Acting Like a Grown-Up

In some respects, it was a typical weekday—crawling up the 101 freeway on my way to work, eyeing the clock and checking phone messages. But consider the actual work I was about to perform: five minutes of staring at my headshot followed by 45 seconds of kneeling in front of a camera, screaming “Shut the hell up, Jack! You got us into this mess and now they’re going to kill us!” The director stood up and six pairs of scrutinizing eyes followed me to the door. With a unanimous “Thanks!”

I was gone. Back on the 101 and time to call it a day.

It really wasn’t such an atypical day for an actress in Los Angeles. There are thousands of us infiltrating the city’s veins of traffic each day. Have you noticed us? Checking our hair in the mirror and making weird expressions? If the windows are down, you might hear us—enunciating away in vocal warm-ups en route to auditions. We’re known to keep large photos of ourselves in our cars and cause traffic at noon on a Tuesday. We were your class clowns and the pretty girls who got the lead in your high school plays and then went on to get degrees in…geothermal engineering. But somehow we ended up here—in this mecca of displaced pretty girls, chasing a dream we’ve had since we were six years old. We’re everywhere.

It just seemed so…odd, that particular day when I acted out the kidnapping scene for a film audition. On my drive home I reflected on the nature of being an actress and how different it is from most people’s work. On a very surface level, I “play pretend” for a living. At its core, I explore different sides of myself to bring about emotion in an audience. Maybe even influence and change people.

I’ve been acting since it really was playing make-believe—what else can you call summer-school drama class for 10-year-olds? Later it became a creative outlet for my borderline destructive youthful energy. Being good at acting, having others recognize that, made me an oxymoron: a confident teenager.

So I named it my hobby, then my college minor, and sometimes even my religion, finding that it answered questions inside me and gave me joy and strength. Only recently did I begin calling it my “work,” and still not in the “full-time” sense. I worried, when I got an agent and began reading copy for vacuum-cleaner commercials, that treating my talent as a commodity would change its meaning. I imagine any artist who tries to make money off her creativity faces the same challenge: Now that I’m asking others to see my talent as valuable, what’s it worth to me? Maybe my definition of success will shift in L.A., I thought. Maybe competing with all those other petite, 25-to-30-year-old Caucasian females for a few “quirky friend of the lead” roles will make me bitter. I’ll scorn the indie films and feel validated when paid to endorse vacuum cleaners.

As it turns out, my struggle to maintain personal value of my acting work was not such a struggle after all. It just stands to reason that I’d get more gratification out of playing Lady Macbeth than Lady With Heartburn. And I am thrilled to read any line in any casting office. Also, I came to realize that auditions are as much a part of the work as the jobs I’m actually cast in. Of course, the absurdity of having to “interview” for your work as often as five times a week is not lost on me. There are people who would rather eat glass (or study geothermal engineering) than continually subject themselves to such scrutiny. The worst of it is that I’m being scrutinized as much as my work.

Do I look like the daughter of the man I’m reading with? Am I the right height? Could I be 22? Could I be Norwegian? Could I be bulimic? I do what I can to resemble what they’re looking for but, at the end of my 45 seconds, all I know is that I tried my best and they seemed to like it. Then I walk out the door and force myself to forget it happened. Because if they don’t call me, they don’t want me, and I’ll never know why. My timing may have been off or my boobs might be too big, but I can’t lie awake at night wondering which one it is. You think a geothermal engineer lies awake wondering if a volcano is erupting? When you decide what you really want to be when you grow up, you embrace it, all aspects of it, or you spend your life pondering whom you should have been.

The quest for success in Hollywood is as cutthroat as Hollywood itself leads us to believe. Even after you’ve “made it,” success does not always offer relief. Let’s say I achieve some sort of marginal success, slim though the chances may be, playing a recurring role on a popular sitcom. People are noticing me in the supermarket, shaking my hand. If faking a hostage situation on the floor of a casting office strikes me as an odd way to live, what’s fame like? At lunch with a friend a few years ago, I spotted an actor on the “B” list, as they say, who’d been sensationally killed off a major TV series only a week prior. After the standard L.A. nonchalant glance, we whispered for a minute about his character’s gruesome demise as the target of an out-of-control helicopter in a hospital parking lot.

I looked around and could perceive the same exchange between other sets of friends around us. Even if the B-lister couldn’t make out everything we were saying, surely he was hyper-aware that wherever he went in life, the word “helicopter” was whispered in his wake. By people who probably couldn’t name him as an actual person. At restaurants. At the gym. Walking his dog. Feeding a parking meter “…helicopter…helicopter…helicopter…helicopter.”

The ludicrous nature of fame is matched only by its temporal limitations. My former neighbor is a TV actress you would recognize. Maybe not at first, but after the requisite glance you’d certainly tap your friend on the shoulder and engage in a quick game of “What was she in?” It was a hit, back in the ’80s. A knock-down, talked-about, semi-long-lasting hit that did a lot more than pay her medical insurance, and in her role she was talented and memorable. Sadly, all she’ll ever be to the public is that character. After the series was cancelled, she enjoyed guest spots on a few shows and then blurred back into the crowds of pretty girls and class clowns. No one wants to cast her because she’s recognizable. When people run into her on the street, they seem almost surprised that she still exists, 20 years later.

If it seems an undesirable vocation—one in which excelling at your work could cost you the rest of your career—rest assured: I didn’t choose it. Acting lit its geothermal flame within me decades ago, and whether it puts gas in my car or just ignites my passion, it’s my business.

Amy C. Quick knows nothing about geothermal dynamics but has managed to use her English degree to pay for new headshots twice a year.  She writes personal essays and articles, and is a freelance editor of books and magazines when not attending auditions.

~Amy Quick