The Great Acting Blog: “Why Bother Reaching Beyond Mediocrity?”
Encouraging actors to strive to be great is often a difficult message to sell, because, essentially, you do not need to be a great actor in order to get work. In fact, we see plenty of mediocre actors out there with very decent careers, the sort of careers we might want for ourselves in fact. The casting process seems to have no rhyme or reason, rarely is it a true meritocracy, and so it appears that there is no incentive to go through the effort of raising our work above mediocrity.
Those actors who are comfortable churning out ordinary work pride themselves on making as little effort as possible. On the one hand they convince themselves that the dedicated are only wasting their time with all the extra effort and discipline, and on the other, that those who accomplish extraordinary feats, do so simply because they are special geniuses or because they were at the right place at the right time.
Why bother reaching beyond mediocrity then? Because you are bothered. It’s in you, that longing to deliver something extra, it’s in your nature. It’s not necessarily about material gain, the effort is motivated by the desire to meet your own standards, to amaze yourself, and to experience the sheer pleasure of continually getting better at something. Where will this pursuit take you? Who the hell knows?
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