Actor Growth

While working on Samurai Girl yesterday I met a lady who was talking to me a bit about her personal experience in the film industry.  She used to do some commercial work and eventually decided to just do extra work as she didn’t like the constant rejection factor that you have to learn to deal with in this industry.

She happened to be Asian herself and she started to tell me about this recent documentary, which I can’t remember the name of, that revolved around how if you are an Asian in the film business chances are you can only succeed with stereotypical roles/traits.  Some examples that she told me was a martial artist, a computer geek/techy or a business person.

While I personally haven’t had the opportunity to work on a big production yet as an actor, my experience has been a little different.  Virtually all the roles I have done when it came to independent films have been non stereotypical and I auditioned like everyone else.

For example, one of the more recent ones I did was for a lead role about a neat freak living with a messy roommate (I was the neat freak).  With that, it was more about having the right look such as your body dimensions and age look as opposed to ethnicity.  Similarly, I recently submitted myself for an audition that needed a person to play as a teenager and they called me in out of hundreds of submissions still.

There was one interesting example though about stereotypes that crossed my mind to show that it definitely exists.  I’m currently trying to find a principal agent for myself and seeked help from a local actress.  She wanted to create a demo reel with me and one monologue that she wanted me to do was about a computer scientist of some sort and was pretty adamant about that being a contrasting scene to demonstrate my skills.

I then mentioned how this must have been because most roles for a Chinese person like myself involves stereotypes like these.  She acknowledged that sentiment and then mentioned that I should learn to embrace them as everyone is stereotyped in different ways when it comes to acting whether it be your ethnicity or nationality.

If the independent films that I have done are any indication then people are becoming more open minded about casting an Asian to play non stereotypical roles.

As a teenager I always thought I would go into something tech oriented and I was a fairly quiet person. During high school though, for one reason or another the school’s theatre program instructor really pushed me to take the theatre acting program. I personally thought he was crazy too considering I always got nervous whenever trying to speak to a large group of people.

I then learned later on that a big reason for wanting me to go into the program was that the instructor wanted to break a stereotype that Asians were too quiet and could not succeed in the program. As a point of note the school, Templeton Secondary, had one of the best theatre programs in all of BC with an ample amount of awards and recognition to back it up.

Long story short, I eventually did decide to dedicate myself to the program throughout my high school life and accomplished a lot including winning recognitions in provincial competitions. It really did change me a lot as well for the better such as giving me the confidence to do public speaking with ease.

After graduation though, the tech side in me still wanted to explore other things such as the growth of the Internet and that led me into a direction away from acting. A few years later, I seemed to have done what I wanted to do to satisfy the tech side in me and I started to wonder where if I pursued acting immediately instead how would it have turned out? At the same time, I really enjoyed film as it is one of those things where you create once and it can stay alive for ages.

As a result, I decided I wanted to get back into acting. At first I took an intensive acting workshop from Studio 58 since my training has primarily been in theatre. Eventually, I decided that I needed to learn about film acting specifically and so I enrolled into a full time film acting program at Capilano college. After completing the program, I was ready to start my journey in trying to make a career as an actor. However, something came up shortly after, which I can probably write a script for one day, as it involves a lot of things that halted my ambition.

Despite these setbacks, just a few months ago I decided to go ahead anyways with my ambition as the longer I wait the more time I am wasting I’d say. As of now, I am doing gigs on short independent films as well as extra work for various productions.

I am still young with a youthful look, so let’s see where this journey takes me. Fortunately with my tech background, running this blog is easy for me and maybe I’ll get to meet some great people along the way.