The Acting Class Industrial Complex: What 20 Years in Hollywood Taught Me About Authenticity
Los Angeles is a city of many marvels: the Pacific Coast Highway, the Hollywood sign, and some of the best on-camera acting classes in the world.
For just $400 a month of your hard-earned cocktail waitressing tips, you can buy yourself a spot in one of these classes, where you’ll sit side by side with other aspiring actors on comfy couches, watching each other do scene work for four hours straight, one night a week.
But you’re not just buying the class; you’re buying the community: the acting guru who will lovingly tear you limb from limb, so she can build you back up in a manner palatable to Hollywood (lose 15 pounds, get highlights, fix the forehead wrinkles); the other actors who will become your friends and lovers (sleep with them while you’re a work in progress, ditch them for someone more famous when you book the gig); and the acting studio itself, which is more or less a cult to which – congratulations – you now belong.
This gives casting directors some indication that you’re not nobody, you’re a such-and-such studio actor. Whatever that means. What it probably means is that you started in theater and don’t know how to tone it down, or that you were the prettiest person in your middle-of-nowhere hometown and came to Hollywood thinking that would be enough.
It’s not.
You’re flaring your nostrils, popping your eyes, and gesturing like a cartoon character; you look insane on camera. Just because you’re hot doesn’t mean you can have dead eyes. You need an inner life. This is television, not catalogue modeling. And on television, you need to pop. Especially if you want to be the lead character, you need to pop. If you’re the supporting character, you need to pop just enough to get the job but not so much that you outshine the lead, because that’s distracting and will piss everybody off, especially the lead, which could lose you your job, so definitely don’t do that.
Do your teeth look straight to you? They’re not. And your nose? It’s definitely not. Don’t worry. It’s fine. Just take forensic inventory of your features, learn your best angles, and only ever be seen, filmed, or experienced from those angles. Your other option is to become a character actor, which makes it okay for you to have aesthetic inconsistencies, but in order to do that you should gain like 15 pounds, wear stripes instead of neutrals, and do something to make your voice less mainstream and more quirky.
What’s that? You feel objectified? Well if you don’t like being objectified, you should go back home to whatever town you came from and get a sensible job where people don’t look at you. This is a visual medium. You knew that coming in. If you don’t like it, you should quit. Seriously. If you can imagine doing anything else, do that.
Still here? In that case, you’re gonna need to learn how to break down the material: