The Great Acting Blog: “Take Responsibility”

All this bullshit among actors who get scared that a colleague might outdo them professionally, or outshine them in the work, is really just that: bullshit. If your fellow actor is playing the scene brilliantly, don’t fume and politic (and I’ve come across plenty of actors who do), let it be a invitation to self-improvement. And support your colleagues in their careers any way you can; share information, promote them – step outside the cult-of-self for a moment and you might find your life and work become more pleasurable. The most miserable and bitter actors I come across, are this way because they are only happy when someone is kissing their ass, and as someone is only kissing their ass a small percentage of the time, they spend most of their life being miserable and bitter. They hate actors who excel at their work and try to drag them down rather than meet their standard, and they think the whole art of acting exists merely as a mechanism for expressing their own specialness (because mummy and daddy did or did not tell them they were special). However, the other type of actor, the one dedicated to aesthetics, need only turn to his work for refreshment, and not only is he uninterested in denigrating his colleagues, he tries to improve himself not only in his art, but also in his conduct, in order to build better rapport with his colleagues, and create a more productive working environment, an environment of trust and co-operation, and one where the understanding is that by serving the whole he is serving himself. Personally, I find collaborating with artists who I respect much more fulfilling than begging an apparent authority figure to like me, it’s more productive too.

The contemporary actor is expected to behave like a child, who, so long as he switches his brain off and is cute and cuddly and does what he is told, he will be petted and coddled. Why? Because many are (secretly) intimidated by acting (and therefore actors themselves): acting is a mysterious business, it cannot be intellectualized, and it refuses to conform to the dictates of science, acting deals with matters of the soul on the one hand and is a physical art on the other. Acting is intensely creative. And so, in our age of reason, we simply say that actors are children and should be treated as such – it is a way of controlling that which we do not understand – and many actors accept the invitation to behave like a child because they think that that is what is expected of them, infact, some even become actors as they think it affords them the opportunity to continue being a child and thus dodge the demands of adulthood*. To behave like a three a year old and be spoon fed, is to relinquish responsibility, and it’s safe, non-fulfilling, and unchallenging.

However, to take responsibility means making decisions – deciding who you’re going to support, deciding who you’re going to collaborate with, who you’re going to say “yes” to and why, and in order to make those decisions in the first place, you must have a sense of what constitutes good and bad work, and that means aesthetics (articulation and employment of) and it’s a real pain in the ass because it’s time consuming, it’s hard work, it requires commitment and self-denial, and if it goes wrong then you have no-one to blame but yourself. And so we can see the attraction of the childish path of just sitting there and awaiting instructions, that world where nothing really matters, where nothing is at stake. But if you take responsibility, you will be properly challenged, the demands will ensure honest self-examination in order to ensure that you can operate at your most effective for long periods of time, because you need to be able to, the 9 to 5 trundle just wont cut it. How hard are you willing to fight for the work you want to do? For the life you want to live? To be the person you want to be? To embody the values you hold dear?

 *These actors usually quit once they see that the life of an actor is an extremely demanding one, and after they quit, they usually dismiss it as an art form and sneer that those who continue are wasting their time, however, they also say things like “but acting will always be with me”, both denying that acting is anything more than a disposition, and attempting to bask in the reflected glow of whatever romanticism is afforded the craft. “I am an artist, but I’m too sensitive to actually produce any work”.