20 Years On

This week it will be twenty whole years since I left drama school. Twenty years since I ran skipped wearily stumbled out of the doors of three years of relentless training and faced the big wide world of rejection.

I should probably write up all the lessons I’ve learnt over the past two decades of aching unemployment, because I’m pretty sure that’s what the world definitely needs right now. Instead, I’m going to share some career lowlights from the last fifth of a century…oh god…

It’s October 2008. It’s cold. I’m in a church hall on Tottenham Court Road with a camera crew. Oh, and I’m wearing nothing but a bikini.

 For the past 10 minutes, I’ve been running up and down this church hall while a production team film me and judge how my body moves. Each excruciating second is marked by the rhythmic clacking of my thighs and every time I run past the crew, I see that their brows have furrowed a little further.

Welcome to my first ever feature film audition.

 

As I finally leave the room with my bikini on underneathmy winter clothes, like an overeager beach volleyball player, I thought that would be the end of the ordeal. But I should’ve known already that it wasn’t. I’d received the first warning sign earlier that week when my agent emailed me the casting call for it:

 

“Strong, athletic, capable of withstanding adverse weather conditions. There is a sex scene and some nudity.”

 

I must admit, when picturing myself embarking upon myfilm career, I’d hoped imagining myself having sex in a blizzard wouldn’t be part of it. I read on…

 

“They smear themselves with the excrement left behind by the elk.”

 

This was never going to be straightforward.

 

By a stroke of misfortune, my wibbly, goose-pimpled body got me a second audition and a week later I found myself in a dance studio with 14 other actors. They alllooked strangely like me but taller, prettier and something else I just couldn’t quite put my finger on. We were told that we’d be taking part in a three hour workshop where we’d be performing as Neanderthals forONE HUNDRED AND EIGHTY SOLID MINUTES.Ah yes, that was it. They were all dressed correctly whereas I, due to some monumental miscommunication with my Irish agent, was dressed ready to audition for a role in a car insurance advert.

That morning contained many low points and I will never forget the sound of my jeans ripping as I embarked upon hunting an invisible bear. But the moment I actually watched my pride get up and leave the room was about two thirds of the way into this humiliating debacle. Just as we were all scrabbling around on the floormaking pretend fire, the bank of producers watching us all suddenly reached under their chairs and pulled out carrier bags. Right then, I hoped they were going to use them to suffocate us and end this misery. But no. Instead they took out stale loaves of bread, threw them at us and ordered us to fight over them while they filmed us. Chaos ensued. Elbows out, game faces on, crumbs everywhere. At one point I saw an actor reach into another actor’s mouth and remove the half-eaten bread from it, all in the hope of getting a few weeks’ paid work. This was becoming less an audition and more a horrific metaphor for the acting industry.

 

And no, I didn’t end up getting the job.