The Life of An Actor (As Imagined By A Nonactor)
When I was in college a professor was trying to explain to a room full of bored students how the ancient Greeks related to their gods. “It’s hard for us to understand,” he intoned pompously. “The Greeks worshipped their gods, as we do ours, but they also laughed at them. They mocked and ridiculed them. They were obsessed with their affairs, with their failings. And yet they STILL worshipped them.”
“That’s not hard to understand at all,” I said. “That’s Us Weekly”.
It’s funny the way our culture perceives actors. Out of work actors (90% of actors, in other words) are a punchline, but as soon as these actors GET work they pass through this odd membrane into the world of “celebrity” and cease to be human.
They are studied, examined, worshipped and altogether treated as something that isn’t human. They’re now “celebs”. An entirely different race.
I was friendly with a girl for a while who ran this website called “Celeb Worship” or something thereabouts. You know the kind. There’s a zillion of them. One time she posted a piece about an actress friend of mine that was (typically) mean-spirited but also untrue.
“You have to take that down,” I said. “It’s totally false”
“Oh it doesn’t matter,” She told me. “It’s about celebs”.
Such is the world we live in now.
But I can’t be too hard on my snarky friend, because in truth I think I kinda see actors as something other than human too. The same way I see mountain climbers or mathematicians as inhuman. They’re simply doing something that not only can I not imagine doing, I can’t imagine ANY human being wanting to do it. The idea of VOLUNTARILY stripping yourself bare emotionally (and sometimes physically) for everyone to see is so alien to my makeup that I simply can’t comprehend. The same way that I could be left on a beach for 1000 years and it would never occur to me that sand could be made into glass.
Let me know if I’m wrong here- what you do is this: you take a story written by either yourself or someone else (more often someone else) and you pretend to be one of the people in that story. And there are all sorts of different techniques in which you pretend to be that person, but the goal is to make us all forget that you’re YOU and make you think that you’re the person in the story. And if we forget that you’re you we clap for you and then give you prizes.
That’s kinda crazy. You know that, right?
First of all, it’s a very odd job to pretend that you’re not you. People love an actor when he pretends he’s NOT himself (or herself) and they don’t like it when the actor is more or less like themselves. That’s very odd. What does that do to you? Not only that, it’s often said that actors (if they’re doing their job of making us forget that they’re them really well) actually BECOME the person they’re playing. Well where does the actor go then? I don’t understand.
And what does it do to your relationships? It’s hard enough for someone to commit to something when you’re you all of the time. How do you do it when you’re not you? I had a very long, very enlightening talk with a (Golden Globe, ahem, nominated) actress once. She said something to me that I never forgot. Said she, “People talk about divorce in Hollywood all the time like we’re a bunch of deviants. Well for one we’re someone else all day at work, and that’s confusing. Second, we’re trained to get used to relationships having a beginning and an end. Our relationship with our character has a beginning and an end. Our relationship with the other actors we’re working with on a project has a beginning and an end. Even our relationships with the crew, the audience, everyone-temporary. They all have a beginning and an end. It’s very hard to pivot from that to something permanent. It’s real work.”
I found that fascinating. And really enlightening.
Lastly, you do a job where you need people to watch you. That’s odd too. Most people DON’T want people looking at them at work. They wanna slack off and do nothing until the day is over. Not only that but actors ask people to PAY money to watch them at work. So if people aren’t happy watching you at work they get mad at you because you just made them pay money.
Every actor I know is crazy. Every one. I don’t mean that in a bad way. Some (or most, actually) are a good kind of crazy. The kind of crazy that makes them take risks. I imagine you have to have to be to want to pretend to not be yourself for a living. But I love them for that crazy. I don’t understand it, but I love it. Actors take sand on a beach and turn it into glass. Really beautiful glass sometimes. And I’ll be damned if I know how they do it.
– Chris Collins, guest writer.
Awesome!