Actor Growth

I was watching the SAG awards today and the most interesting part for myself wasn’t the awards itself, but the part that I thought was interesting was the beginning. Basically, at the start they had a bunch of actors talk about their life before getting their big break and people talked about things such as their jobs at the time.

While the format of it did kind of make it look like one of the alcohol anonymous groups, what was good to take away from that was how essentially everyone’s journey up until they landed those roles has helped them a lot. For example, there was one story about a person working at an office environment for about 8 years and not getting anything acting wise. Then low and behold the role she lands actually dealt with an office environment theme.

In many ways acting is just re-enacting real life experience and so in that sense you should value the things you do each day as you are continually training yourself to better understand various personalities and situations. Everyone has a different path and will play different roles, so you shouldn’t get discouraged if it looks like one person is accelerating faster in terms of landing roles.

Watching this show made me realize one of my goals too as an actor. There was this montage that showed clips of older movies that kind of molded the path for other actors. For the Asians, it seemed like the two main movies that were shown was The Game of Death which Bruce Lee and I think it was either Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon or Hero with Jet Li. Either way, they were both martial art flicks.

I guess we have yet to see any North American Asian actors be taken seriously in roles that would be award worthy when it comes to acting other than typical ones like these. It’s a hard stereotype to break that’s for sure in order to expand your opportunities, but that’s what makes this journey fun too.