The Working Actor

The Essential Guide to a Successful Career

Paul Clayton

• Publisher: Nick Hern Books
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781780017563
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Drama
• Index: Literature

'You are an actor. You have worked hard to be an actor. You have made a considerable outlay, financially or emotionally, and often both, to do this. So do it. Do it with style. Do it wholeheartedly. Do it every day. Be a working actor.'

Being a working actor isn't just about the days you spend rehearsing or performing. It's about approaching your chosen occupation with dedication, energy and focus, so that you always think of yourself as an actor – especially on those days when you're not acting – and that every single day you do something, however small, to help further your career.

Written by the Chairman of the Actors Centre, with over forty years' experience as an actor himself, The Working Actor is the essential guide to putting yourself in the best possible position to get work, to keep getting it, and to make a living from it. It covers a comprehensive range of topics including:

• Finding work: the types of jobs on offer, how to track them down, working with your agent
• Landing the job: nailing auditions and meetings (and how they can go wrong), writing a winning letter
• Promoting yourself: compiling a showreel, building your website, choosing (and resembling!) your headshots, networking both on- and offline
• Supporting yourself: choosing a suitable day job, joining Equity, staying positive, avoiding feeling isolated
• Each chapter features a work task to inspire you to reflect on what you've learned and to put your knowledge into practice. By the end of the book, armed with your own personal Working Actor Plan, you'll be ready to find your path in the industry, manage your career, and maximise your potential.

The Working Actor is an inspiring, reassuring book for actors of all ages and backgrounds – from recent graduates, to more experienced professionals – who want to take their career to the next level. It won't teach you how to act – but it will teach you how to be an actor.

'Paul Clayton's great experience as a working actor shines through these pages. His passion for our profession remains undimmed, but he doesn't disguise the pitfalls and doldrums that are an inevitable part of an actor's life. Paul's book is an essential companion to anyone starting out, and pretty damn useful to those already out there. I only wish he'd written it forty years ago.' Alex Jennings

'The most comprehensive, informed and practical advice on the job of acting you are likely to find.' Paul Clarkson, Head of Acting, Bristol Old Vic Theatre School

'If you need advice as an aspiring actor, Paul Clayton is the man to go to. A must-have – and a good read too!' Anita Dobson

1. Getting started

‘I want to be an actor.’

From the moment I started saying that, aged seven, it was all I wanted to be. It came as a great surprise when I went to drama school to discover there were some people who hadn’t made this decision until much later in life. I thought it was a childhood dream for all concerned. Something that, once you got it into your brain, that was it. Think back to the moment when it happened for you. What made you take that decision to be an actor? What was the initial spur? One thing seems clear: once that thought is in place, it’s very hard to ignore it. It’s been said that you don’t choose to be an actor; it chooses you. Something has been set in motion that is going to govern your life for many years to come. For just how long will depend on how well you manage to make it work.

Let me be upfront about it: this book can’t get you work. If there were some magic formula to getting a job, I would publish it, everybody would buy it, and I would now be languishing on a sunbed somewhere in the Southern Hemisphere. There is no easy answer. Just how do you make that jump from training into the world of work? What you need to tap into is the wealth of experience and guidance that can be brought together and given to you for assimilation, and for you to use for your benefit. Not working can be very hard. Your contact with other actors can be minimal. You don’t feel as though you’re in the swing of things, and that feeling is not very conducive to getting work. Chatting with other actors, you learn what is going on, and how you might use the information to the best effect. Much of the success in getting jobs is having the right information. You need good solid information from people in the know. Working Actors, agents, casting directors, producers, and directors. Tapping into the opinions and guidance of people with experience is an exceptionally valuable way of increasing your potential.

Getting started for many people can be a great struggle. These days when that flame of thespian desire is lit, it’s great to be able to go online and find out information as to how to proceed. Information on all possible training routes is just a mouse-click away. Way back in the days of my youth, when men still walked the streets with red flags in front of cars, and a cheery gas lighter carried his flame from lamp to lamp each smog-ridden dusk, it was harder to find out just how the world of show business linked to South Yorkshire. But link it I did. The National Youth Theatre was my first step, an organisation that still provides a platform for many young people to start their journey today. It was as part of the company in the early seventies that I suddenly realised that drama school was a possibility, even for someone like me from a background and place from which actors just didn’t seem to come. If no one in your family has ever ventured into this world before, it’s easy to question whether you have any right to be there. The answer is that you do. If you have a passion to do something, then that passion can carry you a long way. So often in social situations, on holiday, or in casual conversation, when it’s revealed that I am an actor, there is a response from someone in the group: ‘Ah yes. I wanted to be an actor. I used to do it a lot when I was young. But I decided I wanted a proper job. With a salary.’

On hearing this, or any one of its hundred variations, I nod, smile and say: ‘Well, it can be difficult.’ Inwardly my thoughts are less kind. I’m thinking: ‘Actually, you didn’t want to be an actor. Because once you do, certainly in the beginning, you cease to make rational decisions such as “I want a salary.” You want to be an actor. Nothing else will do. You don’t settle for less. The first test of whether you will be one is whether you have the strength to become one.’

For most actors, drama school or university are the first steps on what may be a very long ladder. There are some who feel that the slightly more academic route of the university drama course is for them. They may be persuaded by parents who are still clinging on to the hope that their child will choose a career that has job security, a defined path, and more important, is something with which they can identify. In the 1970s, taking a university drama course was seen as getting something to support you when the acting failed. Now, in the twenty-first century, we are all aware that a university degree is no guarantee of job security. In fact, the argument that acting is a precarious profession is not one that carries much weight when persuading people not to undertake it. In these times of economic uncertainty, many professions can be labelled precarious. At least as an actor, you know that tomorrow there’s also a chance that the phone will ring; that the day might bring something new and amazing. If you’re a plumber who has just been fired from a long, secure, in-house maintenance contract, the odds are much smaller that someone is going to ring you on the off-chance asking for a new ballcock.

For myself I always knew that the route was going to be drama school. My school were keen to push me to a university, not to read drama, but to do a subject that they felt was suitable for a Yorkshire red-brick grammar-school boy in the 1970s. I was Oxbridge material, so I was told, but what I was not told was that Oxford and Cambridge are as good a launching pad for a career in the theatre as a drama school. I was constantly told I should concentrate on having a viable career, and that plays and acting were for high days and holidays. These words were spoken to a seventeen-year-old who had just played the lead in the school’s production of Oh! What a Lovely War and who had garnered praise from the Rotherham Advertiser and the Sheffield Star – words destined to fall on fallow ground. I managed to locate one dog-eared pamphlet in the school careers room entitled ‘A Career in Drama’. Even this was focused on those who wanted to teach the subject, but it did mention where you could get information about drama schools.

I was offered a place at RADA eventually, but with this good news came the dawning realisation of just how wealthy my parents were not. Funding me through three years of a London drama school was quite simply not an option for them. In those days, if you wanted a grant from establishments such as RADA, Rotherham Borough Council set its own test. You auditioned for a matronly woman in a church hall on a Saturday afternoon who would assess your talent. It’s a cause of immense irritation to me that I can no longer remember this woman’s name, but I can remember her decision. I was not talented enough for a discretionary grant for a drama school. I applied for a scholarship from RADA. That was also not to be. However, I was not to be dashed upon the rocks. My passion still burned high enough. I discovered that with two A levels, and a place at Manchester Polytechnic School of Theatre, Rotherham Council were duty-bound to give me a grant. And that’s exactly what happened.

If I had been trying to do the same thing in today’s climate of student loans and a lack of grants, I am not sure I would have made it. These days, funding a training has to be even more imaginative for young people from low-income families. Scholarships do exist, but they are few and far between, and competition for them is stiff.

If you are a drama-school graduate, your struggle to get there was probably as hard or even more so than mine. To secure funding and a place to further your ambitions takes a great deal of hard work, even if there are family treasures that can be sold to pay for it. Though now there are more drama-school places open to aspiring actors than there has ever been, competition these days is increasingly fierce. You may have not been able to audition for all the drama schools of your choice. It can cost £1,000 or more to come to London and audition for five drama schools. The big six – RADA, Central, LAMDA, Guildhall, Bristol Old Vic and [insert your favourite sixth choice here] (Rose Bruford, Mountview, ArtsEd, East 15 and ALRA are all contenders) – will have most people auditioning for them. After that, you have to work your way through the rest of the list as appropriate. Drama schools have to operate as businesses. They have quotas to fill, and course fees to collect and, at £27,000-a-student for a three-year course, you’re more than just a bundle of talent – you are a viable financial asset. Anyone who has sat through a drama-school final-year showcase knows that not everyone they see in it was chosen on grounds of talent alone. In some cases it’s blindingly obvious that some of the people appearing were chosen for reasons other than their acting ability. Possibly the fact that they could bring £27,000 in student fees to the drama school.

Acting is not a quantifiable skill. There is no way to grade it. If there were, the whole process of casting would be made so much simpler. Casting agents would work their way through all the Grade Ones before moving down to the Grade Twos, or, in the case of many jobs, start by seeing something of the Grade Fours as they’re probably the cheapest. Mercifully this is not the case. One man’s Rylance is another man’s Rylan – though I’m relishing the thought that by the time you read this the latter has fallen back into pre-X Factor obscurity. We are all allowed to pick our favourite. Which is what makes it difficult now that the drama schools are churning out so many people, year after year. Inevitably the number of actors who fall by the wayside in the first twelve to twenty-four months of their working lives has increased. It has become increasingly hard to cope with all the things you have to do to get work, over and above just being able to act.

British drama training is the best in the world. That’s why we get so many foreign students wanting to come and train as actors here. Dreams that began in places as far apart as Alaska and Addis Ababa can both come to fruition within the hallowed halls of the British drama school. Drama-school training is constantly reinventing itself to fit the market. Yet even on a three-year full-time training course, time can be short. The days can be taken up with working on voice, movement, stage fighting, text work, characterisation and comedy, and suddenly there is no time to look at how you might sell yourself in the real world. Many of the more reputable drama schools include visits from professional casting directors and agents during the final year. They have talks from alumni who are making a career out of their training, but the very nature of the business means that you only really begin to learn what is needed once you have left drama school. Couple this with a little soupçon of inbuilt arrogance, which every actor needs to have, and it means that you think you are the person who is going to work. So you might suddenly be shocked when you confront what might be called ‘the day the acting stops’.

And, of course, it’s not only recent drama-school graduates that will have to confront this day. Actors confront it several times a year, when a job finishes. Even approaching the grand old age of sixty, if I finish a job and there’s nothing else in the diary, I’m absolutely convinced that I will never work again. For a graduate, the day the acting stops is even more severe. For the past three years acting has been a vital ingredient of your day. Every morning you have woken up and gone to a building where acting has taken place. You’ve not had to question whether it will be part of your life. And yet, now, on this day, you’re out in the wide world and the only way you’ll ever act again is if you make it happen.

What you have to become is a ‘Working Actor’. A person whose life is about being an actor. Because that is what everybody leaving college wants to do. They want to work, and for a very lucky small percentage that will indeed be the case. Sure enough, unemployment will figure in your life at some point, but just how do you minimise that?

This is absolutely the time to start planning. Business planning. Distinguishing between dreams and objectives. Looking at what is in your control, and what you can’t change. If you were in any job, other than that of being a freelance actor, at the end of your first working year you would have an appraisal or assessment with your manager. They would examine just how successful you have been during that year, how you’ve improved, what objectives you have reached, and what you need to do to make the second year even more successful. As freelancers, you won’t find such an appraisal or assessment in place. Yet how will you know whether you have been successful when that first year as an actor has gone by? When you are no longer the flavour of the month and next year’s keen and eager graduates – blonder, younger, and possibly more talented than you – are flooding onto the market. How will you give yourself that edge when you are last year’s model? It’s this constant assessment of just how well you’re doing, and what you’ve achieved, that can be the backbone of giving you both longevity and sustainability in your career. It can help give you the feeling of success that is so necessary to carrying on. It can, in extreme situations, also act as a pointer as to when it’s probably wise to change paths. It will be very advantageous to take a look at creating one of these plans later in the book.

So how do you differentiate yourself as a young actor coming out of drama school? What are the things you can do to get attention? During the last couple of months of your course, your attention has all been on showcases, final productions, and probably the last thing you have thought about is getting a job. Indeed, during these final months it is easy to be much more focused on getting an agent than getting a job. It seems strange that you’re suddenly prepared to put all your hopes and dreams into the hands of another person. The relationship with an agent, if you’re lucky enough to get one, is key to getting work, but it’s not the be all and end all of employment opportunities. Having struggled through a showcase and final-year shows, and having acquired an agent, you can’t just turn off the search for work. You might have to turn it back on again some six or eight weeks later when you haven’t had a single casting or meeting, but, of course, it’s useful to be able to blame someone else – your agent!

Dealing with your agent, dealing with unemployment, dealing with feeling down, and dealing with the people you meet who might give you work are all key to your business.

But whether you’re new to the world, having just left drama school or university, or whether you are several years into a career that has already had its highlights, and yet doesn’t really seem to have settled down into anything regular, now is the time to start your Working Actor plan. Sometimes every new job can feel like a new start and achieving any sense of continuity in a career can be difficult. Let’s begin that with the first of the work tasks below, and hopefully allow you to use the exercises, the ideas, the inspirations, the anecdotes, and at least some of the advice, contained in the following pages and turn yourself into a Working Actor.

Work Task

To record your progress, start a document on your computer, or a notebook, that is going to keep track of your work tasks.

Write down the five things that differentiate you from any other actor. Some of them may be things that work in tandem with each other. For example, I’m currently one of only two fifty-nine-year-old professional actors who were born in Rotherham. Now please don’t tell anybody else that, but write down the differentiators for yourself.

What is it that you bring into the room that is hard to find from anyone else? Don’t think of things like punctuality or discipline – these are expected of all actors.

What is your casting type? Age, social class, character qualities. The more defined this is, the easier it is to hit the right targets.

2.Spotting opportunities

Maximising the number of opportunities available to you is the principal way of improving the amount of work that you will get. Leaving drama school, where training is still primarily focused on the stage, means many people are focused on a theatre job as being ‘proper work’. Increasingly, it is in television that young actors will get their first paid role. There are many areas, though, where your skills as an actor can be employed that you may not have thought of. So let’s create a breakdown of potential employment areas, and then begin to talk through them.

Using young or recently graduated actors as a focus is one way of looking at what is out there. Drama UK recently commissioned an innovative piece of research on graduate destinations. The 2012 graduates from the three-year acting course at nineteen drama schools had their employment tracked. Ian Kellgren, Chief Executive of Drama UK, said:

‘This detailed research is the start of a major project in establishing a keen understanding of the employment landscape for actors. This is very important in helping to protect our world-class industry by providing it with the skilled workforce it needs. It also gives an understanding of the range of opportunities for performers and the challenges in equipping and supporting them for these.’

I’m grateful to Ian and Jude Tisdall at Drama UK, and Jane Deitch who conducted the research on their behalf, for allowing me to draw on the findings of the survey to create a picture of the current employment landscape.

This survey broke down the employment destinations that actors could currently find themselves in into two categories:

• Recorded media: television, film, radio, internet, commercial and voice.

• Live media: theatre, entertainment, dance and music-based projects.

In each of those categories, there are, of course, many subdivisions. The figures that back up Jane Deitch’s research are interesting. In the year 2012/13 (students graduating in the summer of 2012), a total of 474 graduates had their employment tracked. These graduates produced a total of 1,697 ‘jobs’. 365 of these graduates (77%) had representation from an agent, and 427 of them (90%) were in Spotlight, which is considered to be the main casting directory of the profession. What the research makes clear is that doesn’t mean that each graduate had a total of 3.58 jobs! Some were much luckier than others. The research doesn’t tell us the percentage of work for actors with agents, as opposed to those who were unrepresented, but in line with current perception, it is more than likely that most of the television work went to actors who ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Getting started
• 2. Spotting opportunities
• 3. Finding work
• 4. Making your showreel
• 5. Building your website
• 6. Writing a winning letter
• 7. Coping with rejection
• 8. Measuring success
• 9. Overcoming your mistakes
• 10. Making meetings work
• 11. Choosing your speeches
• 12. Thinking positively
• 13. Joining Equity
• 14. Working with your agent
• 15. Getting great headshots
• 16. Working with casting directors
• 17. Being a geek (with apps for actors)
• 18. Working whilst resting
• 19. Working – and playing
• 20. Networking for work
• 21. Getting financial support
• 22. Using social media
• 23. Working with an accountant
• 24. Building your voice reel
• 25. Taping yourself
• 26. Being a Working Actor
• Work Task List
• About the Author
• Copyright