Please do not feed the actors.

Well here we are. My blog, welcome back. Can I just say right now that 2011 pretty much sucked thank you very much. Last year, all in all, more shit things happened than good. I’d really like to avoid any clichés about how the New Year is good for starting new things and resetting yourself and blah blah blah. But they’re all true. So that’s how I’m viewing the beginning of this year. Never mind that it’s already February; I feel exceptionally ready to take control of my future, many thanks to the three weeks over Christmas I spent in America with friends and family. Man I needed that. Actors will agree with me that it’s terribly common to hold a day job while building up acting experience and waiting for an acting career to take off. Well I’m so sick of waiting around for my career to take off that I’ve realised how vital it is that I go for it on my own terms. I need to stop waiting . I currently have a stable but temporary day job and I’ve been telling myself I’d be able save up s...

I’m pretty sure I’ve said this before, but even if I haven’t, I most definitely will be saying it many times in the future. This is the frustrating fact that everything in life happens at the same time. Hey Life, I have an idea. Instead of handing me twenty things to do at once, why not spread it out a little bit? Give me a few, important, manageable tasks and opportunities now, and then a few more later. You could have given me some back in January when I was pulling my hair out because nothing was happening and I felt like I was going nowhere. What’s that, you say? It’s not how you work? Fine then, I shall be tearing my hair out for different reasons. I shake my fist at you, Life.   Let me attempt to summarise my last two months, not in chronological order but in ... Jonological order, I suppose. Firstly, I enjoy my current day job as a bartender. I work in an excellent atmosphere, and it’s nice to have a permanent full-time job and be slowly climbing out of debt. I’ve had to l...

When people ask me what I'm doing nowadays, my current standard response is something along the lines of me attempting to balance my acting career with my day job. This is in a sense true – I mean, I'm not lying to myself – but for a while the problem with that statement is that I didn't really have either one of those things: an acting career or a day job. The waitering thing didn’t work out (ask me later) and for a while I had nothing on the cards acting-wise. This is unbelievably stressful and really panicked me for a long time. Thankfully I have been cast in a promising show and can spend my creative energy that way, and ideally looking for a job can take a back seat while I focus on acting for the next couple of weeks. Except I can’t. Or at least I won’t be able to until I am actually balancing the two. The process of finding a new job is in and of itself a stressful task, never mind the fact that I would prefer to find something that is flexible with...

It always seems that my busy-ness comes in waves. I can have nothing on my plate for weeks at a time when all I do is worry about how I'm going to afford to pay my bills next month, and then suddenly have five things going on at once, and feel stressed about pulling myself in many directions simultaneously. This would be normal for most people, but, with my inability to properly manage my time, I instead go through phases of freak out: when I'm stuck at home, I panic because I'm not working, and when I'm so busy working I panic because I feel I'm not getting enough stuff done at home. ("Work" here applies to both acting jobs and the day job.) Currently I am very busy. I don't usually undertake student films anymore, but I agreed to one recently because it's only one day of filming, and it sounds like it would look good on a showreel. Some actors forget that when you do a student film, it is being produced by students, and I completely understand ...