You know how occasionally some actor’s original audition tape for some film or another will get released, and it’s always fun to watch? Fun to see why they got the part in the first place (or maybe why they didn’t)?
Watching these tapes gives me All Of The Residual Anxiety. Because GOD, I hated auditioning. No matter how prepared I was when I walked into the room, no matter how right I was for the part, I could never be sure that my nerves wouldn’t get the better of me and leave me standing there in front of a huge room of people with my knees shaking, my neck bright-red, and my voice all high and weird…and oh, the lines? Not thinking about those even a tiny bit anymore; all I’d be thinking was GET ME OUT OF HERE RIGHT NOW. It was terrifying, and self-esteem crushing, and it made me dread each and every time my phone rang with my agent telling me I had to go in and read for a new part.
While effectively quitting the acting industry (or being forcibly evicted; however you’d like to put it; the latter being significantly more accurate) was obviously one of the most overwhelming (and frightening) moments in my life, it was also kind of…a relief. Because even though I was being faced with starting completely from scratch, looking out into a wide-open future full of uncertainty, I knew one thing: I would never have to audition again.
Presenting: an audition tape I shot a couple of weeks ago.
As it turns out, I audition quite a lot these days. Always for hosting jobs (like those Allure shows I do) as opposed to “acting” jobs (never again, not my thing, nothankyou), and pretty much always via videos that I self-shoot at home.
How it works: I get an email from my manager saying that a casting director reviewed my reel and would like me to audition for a job by answering a few questions on tape; in the video above, I had to introduce myself (who I am, where I live, what’s going on in my life right now), talk about why I would enjoy hosting a show having to do with real estate (oh my god I would love that), and tell a funny work-related story. I didn’t get this one, for fairly obvious reasons having to do with the fact that I think they were looking to cast an actual expert, as opposed to, well, me. But regardless, I thought it was a fun example of how this process works.
Anyway, auditioning is something that I still do from time to time, even though I never wanted to audition again.
And do you want to know the strangest thing?
I don’t mind it at all. I actually even sort of…like it. It’s fun. And I don’t know whether it’s that I enjoy hosting more than I ever enjoyed acting, whether I feel more relaxed being myself than I ever did playing a part, or whether something in my mind has dialed down a little, making me realize that it doesn’t matter. I’ll get cast, or I won’t, and if I do that’ll be cool and if I don’t that’ll be cool too, and regardless, chances are it’ll have very little to do with My Value As A Human Being (which is how it felt before) and much more to do with politics and past credits and who has the bigger Twitter following and all sorts of other stuff that I have virtually no control over.
It’s an interesting thing to realize – that you can let your past continue to be a part of you, but that it doesn’t mean that you’re stuck. You can take the parts of it that you like with you, use them to inform your future…and leave the rest right where it is.
As it turns out, it wasn’t auditioning that was the problem for me; it was acting.
And there’s no point in pretending to be anyone else. Not anymore.
