Thinking on your feet to get that job

The world of acting is a hard graft and actors need buckets of perseverance, says Shane Nestor

TOO often as artists we play the victim. Yes, actors are underpaid and undervalued, but if you wait to be fed you’ll be kept hanging with your begging bowl. The problem with some of the most talented actors is, they are ready to believe in an imaginary world over a real one, which is very useful on stage but not so useful off-stage.

To quote Joe Purcell (Mail Online), our most famous Irish actor of late: “The stage was always easier for me to do than real life... real life is the problem for me, I still find it hard as I don’t have much self-confidence but it was a love for me, I certainly wasn’t doing it for the money.”

Similarly, I could never get motivated for money, but when it came around it put a big smile on my face. If you want to work as an actor you should think about becoming a producer.

I don’t necessarily mean the traditional notion of a producer in film or theatre. Pat Shortt, Ardal O’Hanlon and Simon Delaney all produce in some form or another, whether it’s concepts for a TV series (Pat Shortt and Simon Delaney) or writing a book (Ardal O’Hanlon). In essence they are entrepreneurs.

Alliances are forged in the bigger theatres like The Abbey and The Gate. Michael Colgan continually employs Alan Stanford, who not only acts, but also directs, writes and has his own theatre company, Second Age, that performs Shakespeare for the schools. Again, it’s a symbiotic relationship.

Furthermore, an actor doesn’t get ahead just because he’s talented. It’s a business — “to break in” you’re better off having come from a famous boy band.

I’m not in that world. I duck and dive between acting, writing and teaching. Up until recently, I waited tables. I have had to keep reinventing myself over and over to survive, but as long as my credit card is on zero, I’m doing okay. And I just count myself lucky that I didn’t have the money to buy a house.

When I started out in acting in San Francisco (and semi-parted with the old order of an engineering profession) it was for the adventure and I have to continually remind myself, particularly in the hard times, that it was my choice to pursue it.

I couldn’t have expended as much energy on anything else. I would work at any old temp job to pay for my acting classes, and I got as much joy musing over the way to play a part than performing itself. And then sometimes my obsessive nature just didn’t know when to quit.

On one occasion, I was up for the part of an ice hockey player in Don Johnson’s show Nash Bridges. My agent asked me could I ice-skate. “Shur! I’m the Cork and European Figure Skating Champion,” I said, and went about learning that afternoon.

A day or so later, I gave a virtuoso performance for the director, (a role I like to call Tumbles on Ice), and they decided to give the part to a Canadian ice hockey player.

In my temporary posts in the corporate world, I would give it all in the first week so they would think I was “the bomb”. That would provide me with the breathing space to learn my lines or write.

If the manager was looking to crack the whip and “work me hard”, I knew the arrangement wouldn’t last long. One such Chinese manageress took me to lunch on the first day, under the pretence of making me feel at home, only to find me shouting, ‘Shark Attack!’, in an Australian accent in the afternoon. I was conducting a voice-over audition for the television programme, Survivor.

Don’t get me wrong, while the actor is undervalued, his value to the community is immense. Particularly in a recession. He provides the distraction and facilitates catharsis for the Regular Joe caught up in the woes of a recession or the humdrum of a grey 9 to 5, (or 8 to 6, rather), world.

The dilemma is that we often love what we do so much that we’d nearly do it for free and so neglect the dark side of the industry. In San Francisco, another agent skipped town with performers’ money valued at about $100,000, ($2,000 of mine included). So there’s the exploited and then there’s the deluded. To drum up work on coming back to Ireland, I set up my own theatre company. In one two-hander production where I produced, acted and directed, my co-actor came to me at a certain point and demanded half the profit. (Bear in mind, this girl had been in Mensa.) “That’s great!’ I said, “You’re going to take half the loss?”

We’d got great reviews and a few extra punters were coming in so she assumed I was milking it. She wasn’t going to retire to the Bahamas after the production, but at least she got paid. While I had to go back to waiting tables to pay for it.

To sum up, like the Faroe Islands who can’t afford professional footballers, Ireland can’t sustain a lot of professional actors, so I guess these days you gotta duck and dive.