Only 2% of actors make a living. How do you become one of them?
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Their general philosophy was:
- take everything seriously. Be 15 minutes early for everything, learn your lines, be a professional no matter how trivial or vacuous the role. Directors and producers remember people like this and want to work with them again.
- audition, audition, audition. Accept the odds are low and follow the above rules anyway.
- if no one is hiring you, create your own work. Start a theater company, do improv, teach children’s theater.
They took this to the degree that if you did a third year Of study there, your major project was to start your own theater company and mount two productions during the year - they had classes in marketing, business and legal issues, how to approach agents, etc.
The overarching message throughout all this is that it takes the typical actor 10 years to support themselves on their craft. For both men and women there is a steep drop off in employability around 35-38, for men it rebounds in your late 40s, for women, it never really does. So you need to have your act together before then.
It'll still be tough but if you don't need to worry so much about money and you have other skills to base self esteem on it'll be so much easier.
It sounds like a good strategy, although I have to ask if being unemployed, struggling with what comes of that and having to interact with a whole bunch of people (while employed in part time gigs like restaurant etc.) is part of what makes actors great. They hone their skills through exposure to the wide swathes of humanity that you may not see while being gainfully employed in a nice software engineering job.
You have a point. Tbh I might consider doing some of that work just for the experience, but I've also done a few odd jobs in the past that involve that sort of thing. Also doing amateur theatre exposes you to a ton of random folk outside of the tech bubble.
He said something along the lines of, the people who hedge their careers end up with nothing. For example, if someone wants to start a rocketship company and they tell themselves they'll spend 15 years in investment banking to accumulate some capital first -- they end up doing neither very well. Maybe they work as an investment banker, but their heart and focus isn't in it, so the perform poorly. They don't end up starting a rocketship company. The people who do that do it from the beginning: they find a way.
Sorry I forget the source and this is written from memory. I remember him saying this in an interview I watched on Youtube.
Then on top of that, many of the people who have stopped acting by their mid-30s are either the people who were not very good or couldn’t handle the ambiguity/uncertainty. The population of actors who remain and are still working in their mid-30s, by and large, are very good and very committed. Not only are they very good, they know many/most of the other good actors who go up for the same roles as them. They have an established network, they have a reputation, they have an inside track on a lot of opportunities.
Random anecdote 1: a mid-30s friend of mine could guess what 5 or 10 people would be auditioning with him for basically any commercial in NYC after reading the script. He just knew who the casting directors would be calling alongside him, and the other actors knew too. It’s a small world once you make it to a certain level.
I think an imperfect analogy would be that it’s like graduating from a software boot camp and trying to go right for engineering leadership jobs at Facebook or Google, or maybe a better example is graduating law school and immediately trying to oversee an major tech acquisition. For sure, there are some that probably could, but even if they have the technical skills, there’s the network, the relationships, the hands on experience that makes it very unlikely.
Fun anecdote 2: acquaintance of mine, successful character actor (like “hey I recognize that guy from something” successful not “John c Reilly” successful), worked steadily from his mid-20s through his mid-30s and then his acting income dropped by 90%-ish over the next 8-10 years. He got a little older, greyer, more distinguished, stayed in great shape, and when he hit 45-ish the work started flowing again. He’s not making the same money as he did, but it’s back to a regular stream of income.
I think if your goal is to go to acting school and semi retire, working in tech part-time to make money, and try moonlighting casually in community theater and the like - that’s totally doable. I think if you’re going to try to join the varsity teams, it’s going to be really tough.
"The first message that emerges from our quantitative analysis is that one-hit wonders, i.e., actors whose career spans only a single year, are the norm rather than the exception. Long career lengths and high activity are found to be exponentially rare, suggesting a scarcity of resources in the acting world. These results are in agreement with previously collected evidence, pointing to the fact that unemployment rates in actors hover around 90%, and that as low as 2% of actors are able to make a living out of acting".
Its message seemed to be that, yes, you have virtually no chance of success, but accepting that fact means you have no chance of success. To have a chance, you have to willingly accept a degree of self-delusion, and have a support system of fellow wannabes who'll back up this self-delusion, as you back up theirs.
What a great show.
The advice at the end of this article is good advice for everyone; not just aspiring actors:
“It’s not fair, and don’t be late”. Be punctual.
But the author has excluded the most important advice that Nick Offerman offered in his book which is: show up early, work really hard and be known for both these things.