Never change

Actors are some of the vainest people on the planet. Just behind models and Essex residents, an actor relishes the chance of watching themselves do a monologue, sing a song or do an impression.

Being vain is quite important if you’re an actor too, though. Obviously you need to know if what you’re performing is any good, and until there’s a paying audience in front of you the only one who cares if your timing is on point is you.

But there’s more to an actor’s package than the length and breadth of his Hamlet, or how comfortably he can slip into Bottom of an evening.

It’s how you fight the eternal battle – your persona versus your identity.

Your appearance versus your casting.

Who you are versus who you want to be.

KEEPING UP APPEARANCES

As an actor in my twenties, I was already unlike my acting peers. I liked to be the centre of attention of course, but I was never prepared to fight for it socially. If someone’s louder than me, then they can have the floor, but if you give me the floor, then we’ll have a great time. I’m the same to this day.

I also didn’t care much about my appearance in my twenties. Typically wearing the same unbranded top and scruffy jeans. I had a dirty old coat I’d wear when it was cold, and I had a coat “for best” that had been gifted years before.

These things likely sound typical of a skint actor in their twenties. I was working a bar job and my spare money went to putting on shows. I didn’t go on holiday and I didn’t buy new clothes.

I did always find spare cash for port, Leonard Cohen LP’s and Gummy Bears though. Looking back, it might be fair to say I was mildly depressed throughout this phase.

The main reason I was different though, I think, is that I wasn’t a jobbing actor like some of my friends. I couldn’t get an agent for love nor money, so I never had auditions. To compensate for my lack of agent, I just said I didn’t want one: “I’m a writer first. I write myself parts and make stuff myself. The dream is to just do that and get paid for it!”

I’d plopped myself on an impossibly niche track, up against it like a blob of jelly on a Scalextric.

The dream to just do that carries on, but what does that really mean?

Of course I wanted an agent. I knew I needed one. And if I genuinely believed what I was saying in my defence, then I wouldn’t have been ritualistically writing to agents and casting directors every New Moon.

But it didn’t change anything. Like a mast without a flag, everyone could see me they just didn’t know what I was doing. An agent gets you in the room. Fights your corner. An agent does the shouting for you.

I imagine many of you reading this had one of two experiences in your twenties (unless you mercifully skipped to the good part) – you were either like me, agent-less and keeping up appearances, or you had an agent and moaned about them.

You only went up for pantos, adverts or TIE productions. You wanted more.

I wanted, more than anything in my twenties, to do those things. I didn’t want to spend my time serving cocktails to Soho cokeheads six nights a week, as fun as that was. I wanted to play the Dame in Swindon or teach kids not to play near train lines as Moby songs play in the background.

Alas no. Not for me.

It’s hard to get the stats on how many actors in the UK have an agent. Researching that for this blog uncovered more about the levels of underrepresentation on telly from various communities.

The most striking being disabled people. A 2022 report published by the Creative Diversity Network (CDN) said that whilst 17% of the UK workforce is disabled, only 6.8% are working in front of the camera. More shockingly comes from this Diversity in the UK study, which reveals that despite there being 21% of the UK population living with disability, just 1.6% of characters on TV are shown to have one.

In an unfair industry, with unfair prospects, what did it matter how I looked? Inevitably the weight crept on and the hair greyed. It was what it was.

FAKE IT ‘TIL YOU MAKE IT

On the flipside – my steely determination never wavered. I wasn’t too glum about the whole thing generally, and expectations evolved with age.

I’d set myself a target at seventeen, confidently declaring: “if I haven’t ‘made it’ by thirty, then I’ll pursue something else.”

Thirty came up quite quickly. I’d spent my twenties producing four live comedy sketch shows, an award-nominated YouTube sketch show, a weekly comedy night in Nottingham, a podcast, four rejected pilot scripts and a filmed failure of a pilot packed with so much bad luck the inevitable future blog on it writes itself.

When I reached thirty, I didn’t want to stop writing or being an actor. What else was I going to do anyway?

And guess what? I finally got an agent. At the age of thirty-one.

Imagine if I’d quit? I would never have had the chance to moan about having an agent!

This is where things catch up with the here and now.

My first agent had some thoughts about an appearance I should maintain. It was linked to what they saw my casting as: a young dad or a cuddly best friend. A far cry from the Hollywood hunk I’d always assumed was my natural casting.

This meant saying goodbye to my skin fade. Keeping my beard a certain length. It meant not getting too hench (like that was ever going to be a problem).

It meant doing all this on the off chance too. Which felt a bit weird. Forcing myself to appear a certain way because a casting director might one day ask to see me for a part where I look like a brief they have.

It’s strange, then, that I started taking pride in my appearance around the same time I was being told how I had to appear. Hitting thirty had a subtle impact on me and I was keen to prolong my youth now. Something I (and I’m sure I’m not alone here) took for granted in my twenties.

Now I was being told to look older – what I wanted wasn’t necessarily what the agent assumed the industry wanted.

And my first professional role maybe proved he was right – I was playing a dad in an epic ad for Nokia. That longer hair, jumper and beard proved I could do it after all – and when I held a baby in a makeshift hospital in Budapest no one was more surprised than me.

Sometimes though I get a skin fade again. Or I let that weight slide up a little higher than I should. It’s never a bad idea to occasionally do you.

Sometimes it’s quite nice to be a mast without a flag – seen, but leave ‘em asking why.

DL x