About three weeks ago, I had my first audition in … um … in so long, I can’t even tell you when the last one was, or what it was even for. I average about 4 auditions a year these days, because most of what acting work I do get is offered to me, and I’m not going to complain about that even a little bit, because I am not an ass.
Anyway, this was the first audition since I had some explosive and life-changing emotional revelations, making it literally the first audition in my life where nothing more than just booking a job was at stake.
I don’t know if I can properly explain it, but that difference was fucking immense to me, and I think is one of the reasons it was the best audition I’ve had in … I want to say a decade? I think the last audition I felt this good about was when I booked Criminal Minds, so yeah it was a long time ago.
I’ve been thinking about it, and I feel like this audition was so great because of how I prepared as a human, as much as how I prepared as an actor. As an actor, I read the script, broke down the scenes, learned the lines, and made clear and specific character choices*. I’m good at that kind of homework, because I’ve been doing it for forty years, literally thousands of times. I enjoy it, and it comes very naturally to me, but I wouldn’t call it “easy”, if that makes sense.
So I did all my creative and professional preparation, like I’ve done for my entire life, and when the usual stress and fear and anxiety didn’t show up, I realized that all the emotional pain and the recovery work I’ve been doing to heal my childhood trauma was actually working! Remember when I wrote about hearing the birds for the first time and noticing that I was out of the dark room? It was similar to that. Maybe I’m making something obvious or uninteresting into something profound, but for the first time in my life, there was nothing more than a role at stake for me, and that freed me up to enjoy every step of the process, including the part where I knew, deep in my heart, that I wouldn’t book the job, because I never book the job**. Since I wasn’t carrying the existential and practical expectation or responsibility to book this job, and didn’t have anything to prove, I just had fun with it. I allowed myself to enjoy the entire process, and I honestly, sincerely, totally did not care if I booked the job. I knew that I’d do a good job, because I always do a good job. You don’t get to keep doing this for forty years if you don’t do a good job. But doing a good job or not really doesn’t matter, because everyone who auditions comes into the room with the same presumed level of competence and talent. We aren’t some of us special and some of us not. There are no sharks or dead money in the waiting room. The thing that’s going to decide who gets this job has nothing at all to do with anything any of us do on the audition. It isn’t about if we are good or bad. It isn’t about being worthy or unworthy. It isn’t about finally booking the job that will make me so famous and successful, my father will finally love me and my mother will finally be happy. It isn’t about any of those things. It’s just about being the best match for the role. And whatever it is that makes the actor they cast the best match is NEVER something that actor did in the room. It’s always something we have no control over, from looking too much or not enough like another actor, to some unconscious energy that hangs around us and makes us who we are. You know how the difference between a gold medal and not making the podium can be .003 seconds? It’s like that, more often than it isn’t.
Again, maybe I am making something simple and obvious into something profound, but I didn’t fully realize and internalize this until very recently. For my entire career, which started without my consent when I was seven years old, I carried so much emotional baggage into auditions with me, it’s a wonder I could even fit it through the door. On occasion, it helped (I have more in common with Gordie than just wanting to be a writer, it turns out), but mostly it just hurt me and weighed me down. Being able to prepare and go into an audition without it was more fun than I ever imagined possible.
Okay. So I had a great time on the audition. This character is so great. He’s misunderstood by the other adults in the picture, but the kids he ends up mentoring believe in him as much as he believes in them. He’s got some incredibly funny bits, and I felt like I could relate to him in a lot of ways that weren’t obvious on paper. I felt like I made some meaningful connections with everyone in the room, and they all felt genuine to me. When I left, I knew that I had done precisely what I set out to do, and did not want to change a single thing. I knew that I had nailed it, and given them the best version of myself. All I could do now was wait and try not to think about it.
About a week went by and we hadn’t heard anything. My manager called casting and they said the producers were taking their time, and that I was in a very small group of actors who were being considered. That was encouraging, and I allowed myself to imagine, just for a minute, how much fun it would be to play this character, and how much I would enjoy being a mentor to a bunch of young actors.
Another week went by, and casting told my manager that I was great, they loved what I did, they loved me as an actor, they loved me as a person, … and they cast someone else.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
I’m disappointed that I won’t get to play this character, and I’m disappointed that I won’t get to be a mentor on the set to a bunch of kids, and I’m disappointed that I won’t get to work in something that I know I would have genuinely enjoyed, and felt proud of. But I’m not wrecked. I’m not bitter. This is the same thing I’ve heard, nearly verbatim, for going on twenty years now, but since I’m not hauling around all this emotional baggage, I have a healthy and positive perspective on the entire thing. It isn’t about me as a person, or me as someone who never really had a say in what his career was going to be. It isn’t about proving my worth to people who I shouldn’t need to prove anything to. It isn’t about proving anything to myself.
It’s about a different person being a better match than me, and that’s it. That’s literally all it is, and if I hadn’t been emotionally abused so much as a kid, maybe it wouldn’t have taken me until I was 47 to have my “this is water” moment.
So I can feel disappointed, but I don’t feel like I am worthless, or stupid. That is a HUGE thing for me, and I can’t believe I spent literally my entire acting career — and my entire personal life until recently — feeling that way about myself.
*Doing that preparation is my favorite part of being an actor. The joy of discovering what a writer is asking us to do, and the satisfaction that comes with finding that interpretation and bringing it to life is what keeps one of my feet in the acting world, no matter how hard I try to step away from it entirely.
**Criminal Minds aside, it always comes down to me and one or two other actors. I don’t even have to ask for feedback from casting anymore, because I don’t need to hear, “you were great, but they went another way” ever again in my life.
