I received a phone call a few days ago from a director I was slated to work with this fall. He had bad news: The movie we’d been talking about making for months had fallen through. Just like that, we were both unemployed. This isn’t an uncommon occurrence, but even though it’s more commonplace than not, that still doesn’t make it any easier to digest once you get off the phone and process the information.
When you first decide to start acting, you develop a tough outer skin pretty quickly as the first of many rejections begin to roll in. There have been one or two times when I walked out of a casting office and morphed into Mary Tyler Moore on the street, barely restraining myself from tossing up my nonexistent hat and shouting, “I’m going to make it after all!” Cut to three days later, when I realize that no matter how often I compulsively check my phone, my manager is not going to call me and tell me good news. Maybe you will make it after all, just not right now.
So when you finally do book something, your feeling of relief almost supersedes all of the feelings of instability and unpredictability that came before. The slate is wiped clean and you feel like maybe there’s a rhyme
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