My first acting gig
Sometime in late 1997, around November, a friend of mine told me a casting director from Los Angeles was in town and I should try to get an audition. Without representation, getting an appointment was not a viable option. I decided to go to the hotel where she was and “crash” the audition. In retrospect, I am not sure what came over me that day because my confidence level was iffy. The self-consciousness and awkwardness were and unfortunately still are a large part of my overall energy, my everyday existence. So how did a kid born in Hong Kong and raised in Queens NY decide he wanted to pursue a career as an actor?
I showed up at the hotel early, knocked on the door, and after some apologetic words along the lines of so and so said I could come and audition, she kindly said to come back in an hour. Auditions are or can be a brutal process depending, and it’s really something that I never did enough of to become proficient at. One needs to be 100% focused and prepared, otherwise it may be over the second you open your mouth, or even prior to. By this I mean the vibe the actor emits has an impact. Over the twenty-plus years that I was actively pursuing a career as an actor, I do not ever recall having more than twenty auditions in a year, which really just was not sufficient for the purposes of landing a gig; it’s all to a certain extent just a numbers game. One’s training, education, and a host of other factors are essential but in terms of film and television, it can be somewhat of a catch-22. It’s difficult to get an audition without some credits and, or an impressive college education on your resume. Then in turn, how does one go about getting credits when you can't even get an audition? Well, that is why the laid-back, introverted types(yours truly)may not be well suited for the business of acting. That is not to imply that a large ego is all that is required. Again, it is about being well prepared, always working on your craft, and being a professional.
English was my favorite class in high school. I especially enjoyed volunteering to read something out loud. Some poetry, some Shakespeare of all things was always interesting. One of the first acting classes I took helped me recognize I spoke with an odd mixture of an accent and sloppy diction. In my early 20’s I devoted myself to speaking proper unaccented standard English, doing a good amount of voice and diction work, so much so that I became self-conscious about how I sounded whenever I spoke at auditions. There was definitely progress but there were also distractions, the line in one of my favorite John Lennon songs comes to mind-“life is what happens while you are busy making other plans”. To this day, I would like to wake up one morning and sound like Richard Burton or speak verse like Derek Jacobi. During those early years, I wanted to be a complete actor in terms of all the technical aspects, voice, diction, movement. It became an obsession of sorts to be able to speak verse, walking around with a piece of cork in my mouth practicing iambic pentameter with a metronome. There was some nice progress in a span of several years but I could never do the Henry V, Saint Crispin’s day bit the way I thought I could have.
Now back to my “crash” story. What happened next is a little blurry, typical audition I suppose. She gave me some info about the project and mentioned the director’s name which at first, drew a blank for me. Then she said films like At Close Range, Glengarry Glen Ross, and in my head, I was going, what? damn! wow! no! Good thing it was just a couple of pages of sides to read from and a handful of lines. After a few read-throughs, she asked me to come back later that same afternoon to read for the director. Callbacks are hard to come by and that was the only time I ever got one on the same day as the audition. Fast forward an agonizing month, of wondering with some hope, the phone rings, and it’s the casting office.
I like to and do believe I gave everything in my soul to the few acting gigs on my resume. Having had my opportunity, or opportunities, my proverbial one shot to have a career as an actor, my actions yielded truth which I ignored. While I did give all I had during those two-plus months working on that first gig, it was not enough. When I shot my last scene there was this sense of relief, similar to finishing a marathon, like whew, that was rough but I finished. Well, that was not the mindset to build a career on. I needed to be thinking I am going to get up and run another one tomorrow then run that ultra-marathon the following week. You have to keep going because once you stop, pain takes center stage, and ever-looming doubt rears its ugly head. Grasp and hold on to that fleeting, elusive, and somewhat addictive brilliance referred to as being in the “zone”. Then again, it may be how the process functions, a day-to-day revelation of one’s destiny which in turn can just be an illusion of sorts. We go climb mountains seeking adventure and perhaps some existential meaningfulness while already sensing none exist. Then in a blink of an eye, 20 years go by, your hair is gray, all your joints ache and you are now just holding on.
