The Great Acting Blog: “An Acting Career Has Multiple Destinations”
An acting career is not about a moment, or a judgement. It’s not about “making it” by a certain age. Our careers rarely unfold in the way that we thought they would. They rarely move along as quickly as we had hoped, our progress is rarely as elegant as we would like it to be, our impact rarely as potent as we envisaged. We move forward by increments so small that sometimes it hardly feels as though we’re moving at all. And yet, when we look back over the course of a year or a decade, we can indeed see our accomplishments more clearly. In fact, we often see that we’ve done a lot more than we thought we had.
An acting career is about creating a body of work over time. We need to accept that a lot of it is outside of our control. There will be ups and downs, wrong turnings and dead ends. We’ll make horrendous errors. Cherished projects will have to be put back on the shelf sometimes. There will be missed opportunities and injustices, and they will hurt. But know that none of it is fatal, that yes, occasionally we may need time to recover from a setback, but recover we will.
Settle down for a journey which has not one but multiple destinations.
