for ten minutes today, i’m going to be an actor

Today, I have my first audition in … a year? 18 months? Something like that. It’s in 2 hours, and I’ve been preparing the scenes all day. It’s been super fun to break the sides down, try out different intentions and doable actions, and despite my best efforts, now I kind of want to do this role, because I think it would be fun. I won’t book it (I never do), but I’m surprisingly excited just to go into the room, flex my actor muscles for a minute or so, and then come home and get back to my regular life.

I usually go into a room with my scenes prepared, my take on the character, and the professionalism you’d expect from a 40-year veteran actor (holy shit that’s a long time). I have to emotionally separate myself from the outcome, because that kind of thinking gets in the way of my ability to perform, and interpret material.

But I’m not gonna lie: I’d love to work on this movie. The script is adorable and sweet and a lot of fun. It’s a movie for young people, and can I just tell you how strange it feels to know that I’m going in for a role of a teacher/mentor/cool adult in a project that’s really about the kids this character takes care of.

Maybe this will be the first time in over 15 years that I book a job from an audition. The timing is about right, in terms of swings of the bat and actually getting on base. Most actors have between 20 and 30 auditions for each job they book. I average about 4 auditions a year, which affords me lots of time to write and live my life, but makes it VERY unlikely that I’ll be cast in anything. Everything you’ve seen me in since Criminal Minds has been something that I was offered, or asked to do. So in about 15 years, I’ve had about 60 auditions and booked zero of them. I am *way* due to get a hit.

And I have to go into [major studio] today, and forget all of that. I have to forget how unlikely it is that I’ll book the job, or how fun it would be to play this charactern and how much I’d love to be part of something that’s fun and positive and inspiring to kids. I have to throw all that away, pretend none of it exists, and just do my best job interpreting the material, and bringing it to life.

“Just.”

If I’m lucky, what I do will be what they want. But if I’m not the person they want for this role, it’s not going to wreck my day the way it has 60 times over the last decade and a half, because I’ve done a lot of emotional heavy lifting and a lot of vital psychological work to separate my self-esteem and my personal sense of worth, from my success or failure in auditions. Like, I’ll be disappointed when I don’t book this job, but it’s not going to destroy me and make me question my entire life and career choices the way it did as recently as six months ago. It’s profoundly weird to know this.

ETA: I just got home.

I posted some videos on my Instagram story, if you want to see how it went, but … I had SO MUCH FUN! I loved the material, and every single person in the room was so welcoming and present and friendly, they created an environment where I could do my best work.

And I think I did my best work! I made some clear and deliberate choices, and I had a lot of fun bringing this character to life with them. I did two scenes, which show the two (profoundly opposite) poles of this character. I got some direction and made an adjustment on one of the scenes, and had even MORE fun with the direction than I had on my own.

Overall, it was a fantastic and fulfilling experience, and though it remains EXTREMELY unlikely that I’ll be cast, I feel super great about what I did today.