The Actor Factor

My visiting college friend and her wife skipped back from their day at the beach with springtime in their step and delight in their eyes.

“We got talking to a man,” said my friend, “over coffee.”

Photo by Allec Gomes on Unsplash

“That was nice,” I said: Americans on the whole are more chatty in public than are Brits.

My friend’s wife leaned forward excitedly.

“He’s an actor,” she confided.

“That was nice too,” I said: actors do tend to be a friendly bunch.

My friend nodded, importantly.

“An actor,” she confirmed. “We’ve even seen him. In that thing about the aliens.”

“We didn’t recognize him though,” said her wife. “Because he was covered in green goo. But guess what!”

“What?” I said.

“He’s on TV tonight!” said my friend. “In a show called Zelda versus The Zombies! Do you know it?”

“Um,” I said. “Not particularly.”

“It’s on at 8.00,” said her wife. “And this time we will recognize him because he plays a school counselor who gets his blood sucked by a vampire cheerleader. We can’t wait!”

“I’ve brought some wine to celebrate,” said my friend.

To be clear, neither my friend nor her wife is by any measure a babe in the urban woods. My friend is a respected professor of physics at a large university in the North of England; her wife a much-feared human rights lawyer. They have lived in Australia and Hong Kong and own a second home in Tuscany. They go to the opera and belong to a wine of the month club. They are, in short, seriously grown-up.

Yet, like a surprising number of visitors to LA, they are both surprised and thrilled when they happen to run into a person who works in the local industry.

It’s hardly a secret that movie stars live in Los Angeles, and most people who visit do so knowing that, if they are interested enough in spotting a celebrity to haunt the sort of places celebrities go to, chances are good they will be able to partake in the heady experience. Others, who have read up a little more extensively, will also be aware that a sizeable proportion of the wait staff at any bar or restaurant will consist of struggling actors with one eye on their job and the other on their break into show business. A local friend with a powerful baritone voice is in the habit, when feeling himself overlooked by waiters, of producing his cell phone and booming delightedly into it, “Meryl! Sweetheart!” in a bid to attract attention. A little disturbingly, this will often work.

A less documented demographic of this city whose life stream, after all, is entertainment, is the great majority of actors here who live in between the extremes of the Beverly Hills mansions and the “Do you want fries with that?” These are the people who take the bulk of the smaller parts in films and television shows, managing to appear once or several times a year on large screen or small, which will cover their major expenses and qualify them for health insurance from the Screen Actors Guild, and in between honing their craft by performing on stage in the numerous “99-seaters” – the small Equity-waiver theaters that offer actors the minimum wage while allowing them both exposure and artistic expression – that are dotted across town. The jobbing actors are the unacknowledged backbone of the entertainment industry: they are neither demi-god “A” listers nor desperate clingers-on, but regular Los Angeles working people, paying their bills, shopping for groceries, filling their car tanks at gas stations and drinking coffee in coffee shops, just like you and me.

Well, maybe not exactly like you and me. They will, for instance, disappear for weeks on end when rehearsing a play, to reappear at odd hours with their hair shorn into a military buzz cut, or dyed brilliant pink, or in the case of one sweet-natured soul I know, sporting massive mutton chop whiskers to play an Edwardian cad. (“They’re getting me the wrong attention in some places,” he growled conspiratorially during a pause in our ballet class, “if you know what I mean.” I didn’t, and was cravenly relieved that we were summoned to perform our sauts de chat before I had the opportunity to find out). They will march into your kitchen and begin to rifle through your napkin drawer for the one with a strawberry motif that they were sure they’d used last Easter that would be perfect for Desdemona’s handkerchief. If you happen to have an accent they will be adopting, they will narrow their eyes beadily when you speak and demand that you repeat “Cheltenham” again and again until they feel they have correctly nailed the particular hiccup between the “elt” and the “num.” (This might take a while). They will turn up at your doorstep white-faced with shock, mumbling shakily that “I’ve just had to shoot my mother,” and you’ll feed them chocolate and make soothing noises, knowing they haven’t really shot their mother, but for their new play have been required to begin to get themselves into the mind space of doing so.

Ah, the mind space of an actor. Actors send their minds into truly horrible places. They kill; they die; they cheat and are cheated on; they lose loved ones; they lose bodily functions; they lose trust in humanity; they lose self-respect. But ask them why they choose to experience any of this when they could instead be sitting at home with a glass of blackcurrant cordial arranging their holiday snapshots, and they look astonished. “Because it’s so interesting,” they cry enthusiastically. Call me incurious, but sign me up for flower arranging instead. Or stamp collecting. Or, at a pinch, scooping out my eyeballs with a teaspoon.

Because actors spend their professional lives investigating the emotions of other people, it is often assumed that in their own emotions they must be somehow untrustworthy. This is unfair. Yes, they might throw themselves heart and soul into pretending to be the Prince of Denmark, or a Cockney flower seller, or a disastrously bored Norwegian housewife, when they’re on the stage, but they don’t actually expect you to believe they really are when they’re off it. On of life’s great pleasures is hanging around outside the theater after a play to see Thomas Jefferson and King George III walk out together giggling like schoolboys, or have Joan of Arc race to grip your arm, hissing desperately that, “I need a martini and a cigarette now.”

A notion that does generally hold true, however, is that actors are particularly good company. If an actor is telling you a story, they will instinctively act out all the parts. “I was walking down the street …” arms swinging, eyes wide and alert “… when I saw a dog …” head swiveling, grin broad, tongue wagging merrily “… and his owner …” beetle-browed scowling stride … and so on. If they’re describing a play they’ve seen, you can save yourself the price of admission; if it’s a party, you might want to have some Alka-Seltzer to hand for later.

If, on the other hand, you are telling them a story, the energy level will, if anything, increase. It’s also true that actors love an audience, and, being on the whole generous souls, they believe in providing one, too, when called upon. If you are telling an anecdote to your actor friend, you must be prepared for reactions. For furrowed brow of concentration, for gasps of incredulity, for ribs clutched in hilarity, for teeth whistled through in wonder. To be honest, this can be mildly disconcerting: I have at least one dear actor friend whose eyes I avoid when telling a story because I know that to engage more closely would be to risk vertigo. But that’s what they do. It’s what they’d want from you, after all.

Are actors eccentric? Often, yes. Are they mildly loopy? Some of them, most assuredly. But do not for one second be fooled into believing that they are to be dismissed; because, at their core, they are one bunch of tough cookies. They have to be. They will experience rejection after rejection after rejection and still stay hopeful for the next audition. They will leap into a role at a moment’s notice, memorize chunks of lines overnight, learn on the spot to fence, or to do a magic trick, or to tell a joke in Mandarin; they will fly across the world, prepare themselves to love or to hate, and smile over any obstruction from hangover to heartbreak to hemorrhoids, because by golly, there is a show to put on, and when the curtain goes up, by golly they will be there for it.

They are the beating heart and the indomitable spirit of this city of ours. And if we can rebuild our lives after January’s devastation – and oh, we can, and oh, we will – it is in large part because of what we have learned from living with our actors.