The Suspension of Disbelief

Unpredicted heights in Chicago.

After the end of a recent gig I decided to bring my agent out for a drink to thank them for their work. I've not done this enough in the past but it's something they warmly accepted. Sat in one of London's newest gin emporiums we got chatting as I attempted to drink from a thimble. I always try to avoid talking shop on occasions like these; I feel maybe it's disingenuous and possibly entrapment to invite your agent out for a drink and then grill them on why you're not all over Netflix like a pox. But neither do I hold back on sharing what might be described as more fanciful ambitions.

In my experience most agents are realists and they have to be. They see daily how few jobs there are and how many actors. Daily do they hear from numerous clients wondering if JJ Abrams is casting a new Star Wars film, or if the Almeida might consider an unknown actor for their next Hamlet? And daily they gently manage these expectations, cradling them softly to the ground and off to their next meeting for a random BBC daytime soap. Tough gig!

My agent is no excpetion to this and I fully appreciate it. I know where I stand with them as a result and I can be sure I will get an honest, grounded opinion. Every agent by necessity of the job must have this ability to see the world in this way and to communicate it to their clients.

But every actor must have its opposite.

We're all too well aware of the statistics around the working actors and the other 98%. Of the odds of getting into drama school, of getting all the good parts in an RSC season or of giving your Willy Loman on Broadway, of the associated Tony award nomination and inevitable win. And yet year after year we relentlessly go over the top and run joyously into the flames of an industry from which statistically only 2% will not receive crippling third-degree burns.

Why?

We have to. For the most part we are compelled by an odd sort of passionate lunacy. But there’s a form of logic at work also. We have seen the holes, the gaps, and we know it can be done. We've seen the people like us who aren't Tom Cruise but who are working, actors carving out interstitial careers for themselves in theatre and t.v. and we've said to ourselves if they can do it so can we. For me it came watching middle-aged actors on The Bill. I remember seeing these guys doing small to regular parts and thinking “you’re not in an office today. Even if you are working in an office you are clearly more actor than temp, and an actor who today is on tv and being paid to do so”. The psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Victor Frankl goes someway to explaining this kind of logic and reasoning in this passionate and funny little lecture.

And so at the core of every decision to be an actor and at every actor themselves is the solid understanding that the odds aren't the quite the facts. Those that don’t see this tend to give acting a few years and then move on the terra firma in another profession. A perfectly understandable choice too. Have you not seen the stats?

But it is essential that actors keep their heads in the clouds. Keep ‘crabbing’ as Victor would say. We must continue to carry on despite odds, stats, and the gaping fires of hell. And so I respect and welcome the wisdom of agents, of parents, friends, concerned partners and even the strangers at parties for their well structured logic and their concerned appeals to see things from their perspective. Their rooted realism is one that helps to situate my dreams in the landscape of reality but that can only be a starting point for an actor.

What is often defined as the limit of what is reasonably possible, is for us just the beginning. Because every actor, no matter where they are in the profession has pitched themselves against the odds and seen that they can be chipped away at. Slowly and surely. That the mountain crumbles with persistance. The drama school place somehow falls to you, the agency replies, the part goes your way and somehow you’re sat enjoying the view on the 95th floor of a skyscraper in Chicago with a post show cocktail. Who would have thought any of it reasonably possible?

The suspension of disbelief can be defined as the willingness to suspend ones critical faculties and believe something surreal; the sacrifice of realism and logic for the sake of enjoyment. This encapsulates for me the attitude an actor needs to take for any kind of longevity in a career. And especially to begin one.

And so yes, knowing the industry as I do and the chances as they are, I will still wonder, sometimes aloud, about the shining day of my Netflix debut, the eventual Tony award and all the rest. Be not surprised when you hear any actor or any aspiring actor do the same. It’s our fundamental characteristic.

Unrealistic as it may sound fanciful thinking is the pre-requisite condition for any career in the industry.

Now, who’s casting the next season of Stranger Things?