Actor Growth

I guess like any other job, when you are the new guy in the scene you usually want to make the best impression that you can and not wanting to make a big deal about things. Just the other day I was talking to a person who felt that many times there were productions that didn’t credit him appropriately as they simply don’t want to pay the rates of having to upgrade a person to a certain category.

The tricky thing he mentioned was that he is not exactly a big name or anything and so for the most part he just sucks it up as he doesn’t want to be excluded from future projects simply because of the notion that he say asked for an upgrade one time. In contrast to any other job it would be like people hired and paid to be say a cashier yet for some reason they then find themselves having to do merchandising, accounting work, scheduling, etc.

I suppose for myself it is fortunate that I enjoy most aspect of the film industry. So just having the opportunity to be a part of various productions is usually a good reward in itself. Have there been times where I felt that I was taken advantage of like with the example above? Absolutely.

But my hope has always been that I will just continue to do the opportunities that are presented to me to help myself grow as eventually I will either meet the right people or land the right opportunities to enable me to take the steps to move forward. I don’t see too much point in spending so much time and energy trying to get say a production to upgrade you from a small principal actor to a supporting actor if they are reluctant.

Like in that case, if you are still kind of fresh I would think just the fact that you were in the production will give you a lot of new tools and experience to do even greater things.