Acting like an actor...

Went for ANOTHER casting today. Must be my fifteenth one since hitting this town and still not a whiff of a bastard booking! L

The project was code-named as they sometimes are. Companies do this sometimes because the product they’re shooting usually hasn’t come out on the market yet and they want to keep it all hush hush, so I had no idea what it was for.

Had a new experience though. In this casting I was tag teamed with another actor. A taller guy with a beard and shoulder length hair. He had been assigned the director role and I was trying out for the driver. It seemed we were attempting to give the impression we were shooting a commercial WITHIN a commercial so they needed an actor to play a director, and one to play a driver. An actor playing an actor playing a director and an actor playing an actor playing a driver! I was already bloody confused and I hadn’t even walked through the door yet!

Turns out it was pretty straightforward. You really don’t need to be a brain surgeon or even a good actor to do well in these things. You just have to have confidence and charisma. Some days you have it, and some days you don’t. The castings I tend to get call backs for are the ones I walk into relaxed and feeling happy regardless of the outcome. In other words, carrying the knowledge into that room with me that my happiness does not rely on whether I bag the job or not. And I guess that’s true of everything we try for. Ultimately there is nothing in this world which, once attained, will make us truly happy from bone to balls forever! Because everything changes, and NOTHING is permanent. The only true happiness comes from deep within us and is something that never changes. Buddha taught me that! Well, he didn’t actually teach it to me. He pointed the way with his jolly, golden finger. The rest I had to do myself. I wish I could say I DID it, found IT, and now everything’s a piece of cake. Turns out it’s an ongoing project. Bollocks!! I can hear Buddha laughing now!

Anyway, there I was behind a steering wheel in front of a camera acting like an actor acting like a driver. And there was this other actor sitting behind a screen acting like an actor acting like a director. With all these double identities I kind of forgot who I was for a moment, which I suppose is a good thing in acting. I’d pretend to drive, he’d say cut, then come over and make like a director and direct me a bit in how to act like a driver. Having already shot a BMW commercial in San Francisco last year I already had some knowledge of the bullshit that’s involved in these things and so I made like an actor asking the director where to look and requesting some kind of marker be fixed in front of me for something to fix my eyes on.

            The other actor seemed pretty nervous and rigid and I felt for him. Afterwards we shot the shit with the two facilitators of the casting about some YouTube video they thought was hilarious and then I was out of there. I still didn’t know what I’d auditioned for!

Then I got a call from my agent in San Francisco with good news. Even though I hadn’t been able to make an audition in SF last week Buick decided they wanted me for their shoot anyway just from my resume and picture! Score! Probably a print job for a magazine or something advertising their latest model. Thank Jehovah! I’d been watching my bank balance diminish with a horrifying assiduousness ever since I quit all my jobs in San Francisco and heaved all my crap down here to follow this dream. Things were getting tighter than a duck’s asshole and it wasn’t fun! This Buick job should bring in around   two and a half thousand beans! BINGO!