The Wait

The email-refreshing, phone-watching, second-guessing of it all...

I had an interview for an acting job last week. I don’t get many of these now because, well, my acting career just isn’t in that place at the moment. But, despite that, I was contacted via LinkedIn and two days later I found myself on a Teams call with some very pleasant people having an upsettingly short interview. It was for a corporate acting job, a job that I am certainly more than qualified enough to do, and I went into the ‘informal online chat’ feeling fairly confident about both the job and myself. However, by the end of the call, it was fairly obvious that I was not the person they were looking for. I was told they had a couple more actors to speak to but they promised to let me know either way by the end of the day.

Reader, they did not.

Thankfully, as days go, it was an easy one to put the interview out of my mind. It was my daughter’s birthday so there were been plenty of other things to keep my mind occupied, chiefly, why the hell they don’t make you sit a test to ensure you fully understand just how big a Barbie’s Dreamhouse is before you buy it. So whilst I was busy enough to not really worry about the tumbleweed in my email account, I was counting on landing that job just so we can start putting money towards living somewhere that can house the bright pink monstrosity that we now sub-let our flat to.

It’s now the following week and I’m still to hear back from them. Of course, something awful could have befallen them. Maybe they’re sick, a horrendous deadline was suddenly thrust upon them or, as one parent admitted to us after they turned up late for our daughter’s birthday party, they had to watch one more episode of The Traitors. Whatever the reason for this broken promise, it’s not the first time and it certainly won’t be the last. Unless you actually book the job, it’s a rare day when you are actually informed the outcome of an audition, so you do get used to having to put it to the back of your mind. Grab a coffee, see a movie or catch up with a friend, the acting guides like to suggest; you can be as breezy as a woman in a sanitary pad commercial as you like but it will still linger in the back of your mind like the memory of the time you thought a casting director was high-fiving you but was in fact asking for the script back.

In an ideal world it would be nice to get a response. Putting auditions, interviews, pitches or whatever out there to nothing can test even the most hopeful of people. At the moment, I have this particular job still miserably written into our shared calendar with a gloomy question mark even though I know they’re clearly going with someone else. Whilst rejection is hard to take, it is a damn sight better than a haunting query in your diary that you keep there just in case. Of course, sometimes the odds are, or really aren’t, in your favour. Most actors will have a tale of an audition that they absolutely car-crashed only to hear that they got the job, or the casting that they aced and then never heard from. It’s a game with constantly changing rules and you’re supposed to count yourself lucky that at least someone handed you the dice.

So, we wait. I’ll be honest, I half wrote this because I wanted to get these ideas out, but it has also been a nice distraction from inbox-watching. At least there was an opportunity to get even slightly optimistic about and if this was a scripted story then I would submit this wittering out to you all only to see a job offer in my inbox. We’ll see, I guess, or at least hope that someone hands me those wretched dice again.