Readers, acting is a funny old thing. You spend blooming ages stressing out about how none of the auditions you're going for are working out (not that they were good auditions anyway, just ones with mad loons with no money to pay you and dreadful scripts involving mime and ribbons to symbolize death). You bite your fingers to the quick trying to work out if it's your showreel (Oh how you wished you had a few accents in there), your headshots (do they make you look too pageant queeney?) or just your utter lack of talent (they must have made a terrible mistake accepting you into drama school!) and then all of a sudden....BOOM. Awesome audition. Brilliant job. Hope springing anew, agents offering you contracts, directors asking if over equity rates is too little, scripts coming out of your ears. So much so that now you don't have time to eat at normal hours (just entire packs of jaffa cakes at 3am), your free time is spent invoicing people (usually wrongly, so that you get emails back going 'erm...I'm sorry....I owe you HOW much? Why?' from your mum's accountant) and desperately learning lines and trying to work out if it's ok to say no to stripping in auditions (about which there may be another blog quite soon).
I have experienced just this sort of chaos ever since I left drama school last year. If you're not worrying that you might never get an audition ever again then you're tripping up over your own stacked-like-american-style-pancakes appointments. It puts one in a tizzy that can only be cured by lots of buttercream topped cupcakes and diet coke by the gallon (I don't do tea. Irish gran practically overdosed me on cups of Barry's tea as a tiddler). I came off a very exciting and lovely tour in early June, and since then I've had no luck at all. Film auditions that started off excitingly then led to the character I auditioned for being cut from the screenplay. Or shooting dates that I couldn't make because of the wedding of one of my oldest friends. An agency that kept me hopeful for nearly two months before finally telling me they wanted to see me on stage in London before taking me on. I was just starting to think about chucking it all in and becoming a zookeeper when all of a sudden, without warning, a voice job came up. A well paid voice job. A well paid voice job that turned out to be really high profile, for a massive client. And then at the recording, the chap running the session was so impressed that he invited me to join his voice agency on the spot. Meaning if all goes well, I'll now have not one, but two brilliant voice agents. In the meantime, a callback came in for a short film that is paying so ridiculously well I'm actually considering getting my kit off for it. That well. And a friend asked if I needed an acting agent, because their agent had stumbled across my showreel and loved it.
If acting were food, right now I'd have diabetes. Pretty mad considering last week I was starving.
Fingers crossed my thespian 'diet' will even out soon!
Ash
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