The Outrageous Act of Doing Nothing

How does it feel to just, be?

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Yesterday afternoon I sent off an email with a self-tape audition attached and felt myself lean back in my chair, ease my way down into the seat until I could rest my head on its back and breathed an enormous sigh of relief.

In the midst of a number of other commitments, I’d been working on the three scenes required for the tape, for four days over the course of eight. I’d done easily over 300 takes. I’d been back and forth with one of my agents, navigating tone and deadline extensions but mostly my neuroses.

For anyone not familiar, self-tape auditions are the most standardised from of audition these days, particularly since the pandemic, where you are asked to record your audition yourself from home. Some actors absolutely hate them, I actually love the amount of control they afford you — before if you went into a casting director’s office to record with them, they would pick the takes, they would perform with you (and they were not always excellent!) and they generally ask you to leave after about twenty minutes rather than four days later.

I don’t always spend this much time on self-tapes by the way and I didn’t plan to with this one in particular but sometimes it just turns out that way. When you can feel yourself closing in on something almost right but not quite, so you keep going. Perfectionism can play a dangerous role in that too of course, if you let it. But it wasn’t that that I was seeking, it was something even more numinous and intangible. I was looking for realness. Believability. As myself in the body of another human who has shades of characters I’ve played before, but none of me. A new iteration. A new energy to channel. That’s what it feels like to me, acting — depending on how open I am to each character’s mercurial proposition, will determine how easily or not the feeling of that ‘person’ will flow to me.