Actor Growth

While working on set yesterday I was talking to a person that was telling me about his life as a stuntman. I always heard that this was a very difficult field to get into not so much about the type of work that you do, but rather the politics involved in getting those opportunities.

Essentially, what I learned was that to get stunt roles here it doesn’t involve having an agent where say they submit you and the casting director chooses who they want. Instead, the way it works is that the productions hires a person called a “stunt coordinator”. This person then brings people in to do the work.

This is where it got interesting. He was telling me that when it comes to stunts there is usually a lot of money involved as you may imagine and as a result the stunt coordinators can become very territorial to each other in a dog eat dog world type of scenario when one person gets hired by the production over the other. I was just joking at first on how it was like a gang mentality in some ways.

To further paint that vision of how things work, he was saying that when the stunt coordinators give out work a lot has to do with distributing it as see fit based a lot on making sure his/her favorite people are “fed”. With that in mind, it’s not hard to see why this field is so hard to get into from a political standpoint.

You know, before this my perception on how stunts worked if you wanted to get into that field was that you would work very hard in doing simple set work like say background work and then as you become known in the industry as a very reliable person a casting director would be inclined to call you and ask if you would like to do that kind of work.

I remember my last agent told me for example that when you become known as the reliable person, in many cases you have to join the Union to start getting the higher gigs and so if casting directors know that you are the hard working and reliable one they will go out of there way to try and get you gigs such as stunts so that you can get your credits to join the Union.

While both cases are probably true, the story this guy told seems to make sense in a more everyday scenario.