I'm a big fan of Kate Mulgrew (Red from Orange Is The New Black and Captain Janeway from Star Trek Voyager), and I stumbled on this video where she and William Shatner get into a debate about approaching acting as a career, and I really want to share my thoughts on it, because I have lived on one side of this particular fence myself and have very strong opinions. The section I'm referring to starts at 21:46.
To paraphrase enormously, although Bill recognises the conundrum in terms of where to allocate your time and in what proportion, he strongly advocates for having a fall-back plan. A safety net. To get an education and have some kind of skill for when (because it's more likely than 'if') a career in acting doesn't pay off. I can see the value in this.
"Learn to do something else that you can profitably do because the chances of success are remote. Get an education. Learn a skill along with being an actor so that at times or maybe forever you need to go somewhere else you'll have a fallback position because acting is so tremulous" - William Shatner
I can see the point he's making. And this was exactly the advice I had drummed into me when I was 16 years old and desperate to get into drama school. Except I was advised to focus on the fall back and then pick up acting later, by everyone around me, including my Dad. He was an opera singer - he has lived an artist life, he has lived and studied in Florence, toured Ireland singing in a van, took odd jobs as a gardener and a butler to pay the bills. He knows it is difficult. Of all the people around me, he was the only one I felt was qualified to have an opinion. I listened to him. I took his advice, it came from the purest place of love and I would never hold it against him because he is my Dad, my hero, and I love him more than life. But to this day, not going directly into drama school is my biggest regret.
By the age of 16 back in 2002, in the days of dialup, before youtube and certainly before social media, I had already worked my backside off outside of school for 7 years learning everything I could about the craft. People hoped it was just a phase I'd grow out of, but I was deadly serious about being an actor. However, I was pressured into going into university by school, by family, by everyone. To have something to fall back on. I WISH I'd had a Kate as an aunt or mentor or someone - anyone!- in my life back then who had had a different artist life experience from my dad and was able to offer a different perspective so I could have made a balanced and informed decision about my future. If I had, my life would be very different ,and I very likely would not be writing this blog post right now. Kate advocates for setting your cap and charging forward - that in doing so without a safety net you have a significant motivation to make it work because you have no other option.
I know Bill's opinions, like my Dad's come from a paternal place of concern and from his own experiences in the field 60/70 years ago, but because of my own experiences I have SO many issues with so much of what he's saying.
“There you are at the age of 40, no longer beautiful, no longer as vital as you were when you were 25 and you’re looking down a street and you’re saying ‘I don’t know where I can live I wish I had a child, a house where I had roots - I’d love to have roots - and none of that is possible because you can’t afford it’ - Bill
Not everyone wants to own a house and be tied to one location. Not everyone wants to be saddled with a mortgage that drastically restricts your freedom to chop and change. Not everyone wants children; and it is extremely presumptuous to assume that the way of comfortable living that suits Bill Shatner suits everyone. A life in the arts is hard - I'm not an idiot. I've grown up in the Opera world. I've seen enough people and their dreams broken by it. The life of a performer is the life of a vagrant, and that is an accommodation you have to make with yourself when you embark on this journey.
Let's take a trip down the Bill Shatner route. Let's see how it actually pans out.
Because I've been down a significant part of this route myself I feel I am equipped to have an opinion on this. My opinion in short for the TLDR among you is: CWOT, quite frankly I'd like my time and money back.
Apprenticeships don't really exist in this day and age - certainly not in the UK- unless it's for a job in manual labour. And how many women plumbers do you know? Yeah me neither.
So you spend 3ish years going to university getting an education in something that isn't acting. To fall back on. You graduate when you're 21/22. You get your bit of paper and chunk of student debt affirming that you officially have an education that gives you access to better paying jobs. Congratulations you have your fallback.
Now what?
Can you go out and get a well paying job immediately? Proudly waving your degree in the air, you are promptly slammed round the face with entry level jobs requiring multiple years of experience in the field. And how, pray tell, are you meant to get said experience for an entry level job?
Internships! That's how. Which are by and large not paid.
So you spent all that money you don't have, to get an education, to get a job you can't get, because you don't have any experience; because you were so busy spending your time getting an education to get the job, that you didn't have time be getting the experience you needed that you didn't get from your education, which you couldn't have got anyway because you weren't qualified.
So in order to afford the transport to take you to the aforementioned internship to get the experience your education did not equip you with, you need to get a shitty minimum wage job.
Please bear in mind that despite being a graduate with an education you may now fall back on (congratulations etc), you are still not an actor yet. You don't have the training. Because if you attend university to study anything, contrary to popular belief students don't have an endless amount of free time on their hands, or spare cash floating around in their pockets to become trained actors on the side. Because acting courses from reputable drama schools are FUCKING expensive. Show me a student that has £1300 burning a hole in their pocket for a short course at RADA, or even £600 for a few hours tuition on something specific like audiobook technique. And yes you do need training. Because acting is a skilled profession it's not just playing pretend like you're a 5 year old.
No, if you study Comparative Literature like I did, your time is spent reading 5 books a week - some of them are 3cm thick like 'A Tale of Two Cities', plus researching and reading external sources plus writing dozens of essays and attending lectures and seminars for at least 5 hours a day. Not to mention researching and writing your dissertation along side all this in your third year. Oh and working some crappy student job somewhere on the side for minimum wage so you can eat something other than 9p noodles (which are now 25p noodles) for a change.
Which you find yourself still eating after graduation because you're still in a shitty minimum wage job, only now you don't have a student loan to help prop you up, or all the discounts you got with your student card.
Looking good so far isn't it. Now lets do some maths to make it really fun.
So you do your internship. Lets say it's 6 months. You get lucky and get a job that pays you an entry level salary. In London you're looking at about £25k. Cool. After tax and national insurance that's £20k. That's still £1700 a month - that's pretty good right?
-£950 /m rent for a shithole flatshare in Hackney that's possibly even more disgusting than your student let
- £220 /m travel card to get to/from work -£50 /m utility bills assuming you're sharing with 3 others. - £150/m food bills and a lot of 25p noodles
- £60/m student loan repayment
- £28 /m phone bill, assuming you have an iphone on a cheap plan and use your data bundle instead of paying for a separate landline and broadband in addition to a mobile
-£50/m to put aside for council tax assuming you're in a mid band property in Hackney & sharing with 3 others.
Cool. So that's food, travel and board sorted. That's about £1500 on the basics. You've got a sweet £200 a month loose change left burning a hole in your pocket.
Still want to go to drama school? Amazing! Good for you! I believe in you! Go forth and conquer! By the way the fees are about £16k for a postgrad degree - that'll only take you about 6 years to save for on your current salary. You'll be almost 30 by the time you graduate and Bill Shatner says that you wont be beautiful any more and won't be able to work as an actor. Better put in the hours and climb that corporate ladder baby! Take those external management and career development courses to ascend those rungs! With a bit of luck and some solid investment of your own salary in the career you don't want, you'll earn enough to shave those 6 years down to 4 to pay for the education for the career you do want. That is once you recoup the costs of those career development courses, which cost several grand.
It is an unnerring sense of the righteous path that the artist has to be set upon. So I think that you know, once you wiggle, once you wobble, you wobble right off the path” - Kate Mulgrew
This has been my journey. I wobbled off the path. I'm 37, I'm a senior graphic designer. I'm in a position I never wanted to be in, in a career I hate, that I have never had any burning desire to pursue. I don't have kids, I'm not a homeowner, I couldn't afford a house even if I wanted to. I have a little in the savings jar. But I have one helluva safety net.
Lets take a trip down Kate Mulgrew's route
You finish school, you go to drama school. You graduate with student debt which you struggle to pay off for the next 15 years, just like everyone else. However, you have your Equity card and Spotlight membership. An agent may have seen your graduation show and picked you up, or they may not have. Depending on how that worked out, booking jobs will be difficult, or a bit less difficult.
In practical terms, a job that requires a degree is pretty irrelevent. A normal, safe, decently paying 9-5 job (ha! When are they ever 9-5) is impossible for an actor. You need to be flexible. You need to be able to get a call from your agent (if you're lucky enough to have one) telling you you have an audition the next day. You need to have an employer who is flexible enough to be ok with you saying 'by the way Fred I have to leave at lunch tomorrow - I've got an audition' And you need your short notice absence to not drastically impact the work of those around you. When I was working as a designer in corporate I couldn't even take a long weekend booked 3 weeks in advance without fucking over at least 3 departments and having 30 people mad at me. I was entitled to 25 days holiday a year. I took 3 weeks in 3 years. This flexibility doesn't work with the structure of businesses that afford to pay respectable wages. You are paid respectable (ish) wages because you are signing away your rights to a work/life balance in exchange for bonuses, benefits, sick pay and paid holiday. This is why actors end up doing shift work in retail and catering, and crew events because the stakes are low and your shift is easily filled in by someone else at short notice. This is why actors don't have careers in something 'sensible' because they already have a career. Acting.
But to continue down Kate Mulgrew's path:
You book jobs. If you're in the USA you get your credits and send off for your SAG membership. You start getting better roles. They are few and far between. You spend your time doing some shitty jobs and some less shitty jobs to earn enough to feed yourself. You get a ton of different experiences that help fill your mind-palace which you can pull on in future acting jobs and survival jobs. You build contacts in the industry. You get experience with your arse on a stage or in front of a camera. You build a reputation for being a talent and a good worker and eventually people call you up and say 'hey I think you'll be good for this' or 'hey someone dropped out of this play can you step in'. If you're really lucky you get call saying 'Hey someone dropped out of this pilot can you come in for a callback?' and it's a pilot for a well established franchise that gets picked up by a network and you sign a 7 year contract that fills your coffers a dozen times more than they'd have been filled in 7 years in a corporate job, and springboards your career to new heights. Congratulations on your house. Now you can afford kids.
A little further down Kate Mulgrew's path, which has possibly forked.
Say you don't get picked up by a network. You toil in relative obscurity and once you hit 40, bookings dry up and the catering jobs don't cover your expenses cos you now have kids. What do you do? You figure it out. That's what you do. Just like everyone else when they hit a roadblock. You go to night school to get whatever qualifications you need, or take courses online. There is very little that can't be learned for free on YouTube. That's how I learned to be a designer. I don't have a single qualification for my job yet here I am.
So what do I think now, with the benefit of hindsight, and the experience of going down one of these paths?
The simple fact of the matter is that with the cost of living crisis and the overcrowded and unstable job market we're all facing at the moment, there is no such thing as job security any more in any industry. There is generally in life no such thing as certainty. It isn't 1963 any more - if you don't like a job it isn't as easy as handing in your notice and walking into the office next door and getting hired again. It can take months to find any job with hundreds of people vying for the same position. Many of us have side hustles to help make ends meet. Most of us are still struggling to pay off student loans from 15 years ago thanks to interest rates that have skyrocketed. Many of us can't afford houses because they're so bloody expensive and salaries don't reflect the cost of living across the board.
Many people don't 'make it' as actors. It's true. But many law students don't 'make it' as lawyers either. Many stockbrokers and doctors burn out after a couple of years, quit and retrain after spending 7 years and many thousands of pounds on their educations. Many people are doing jobs they never wanted to do, and spend their lives fulfilling the dreams and expectations of everyone except themselves. It is incredibly common for people to have drastic career changes at multiple points in their life, and educating yourself constantly is a normal part of evolution as a human. Yes, other careers will give you a more reliable income and more money than being a struggling actor, but you'd be deluded to think it's a golden ticket to a comfortable life. If acting jobs have dried up or you choose to quit it's not as if you'll find you're absolutely fucked for options. If you have even half a brain in your head you will figure it out.
In this sense I absolutely 100% agree with Kate when she says
“Although I respect what you say about encouraging young people to have a safety net and to get an education I would argue that it’s because we didn’t have a safety net that we did well”
The only thing my 'education' has been good for is filling my bookshelf. If I'd known that youtube would come along and that you would be able to teach yourself almost anything online and even get qualified for it, I would have point blank refused to go to university, I would have insisted on going to drama school to get the vocational training I actually wanted and needed and would by now have (with a lot of luck) a number of credits on my IMDB profile and an interesting 15 years to look back on. Instead of 15 years looking back at time spent in multiple jobs that weren't the one job I wanted to do.
Concerning the availability of work for actors over 40, Shatner says
"the number of people available for those older roles are large and the roles themselves are few"
So... no different from any other senior level job that people are applying for then. It's just that the term 'senior' has two different meanings. In any other job we are all keenly aware that we are easily replaceable cogs in a deeply impersonal machine, that the vultures are circling constantly, and for every job opening there are hundreds of applicants. How is this any different from the acting world? In both cases, the right fit for the part wins. Also ageism isn't a problem unique to the entertainment industry. Actors get a part because they're right for the part. At least they don't have to worry that half way through filming they'll suddenly be dropped because production found someone overseas who would do it cheaper via fiverr, and they have unions protecting their arses if someone tries that bullshit.
It's hard, it's messy, it's excruciatingly painful, full of rejection, dejection, neurosis and repeated gut punches to your ego. It's uncertain, it's unsafe, and you knew this going in. You think to yourself on a daily basis that you're probably making a huge mistake and that you must be insane, but it's the only thing you've ever wanted to do, and if you didn't have to eat you'd do it for free.
If you are an artist living the life of an artist, you are prepared to make the sacrifices of time and comfort you need to make to do the work that makes you feel like you can breathe. If you're not prepared to make those sacrifices don't be an actor. If you had any sense you would walk away, but actors are driven by something other than common sense and financial gain. It is a deep need to do this work that we feel on a cellular level. And even if we deny ourselves from it - like I have for almost 20 years- that need never goes away. It never shuts up. If anything it gets louder until not doing something about it becomes far more painful than doing something about it and dealing with all the consequences. And by concequences I mean the backlash from the people who love you and/or depend on you who think you have completely taken leave of your senses.
Yeah, ok, so I'm only entering this profession at 37. I'm rapidly approaching middle age. And what?
The thing I took the most umbridge against is Shatner implying that once you hit 30/40 and 'you're no longer beautiful' (is he for real?!) you're basically a dead duck as far as an acting career goes.
Considering who else (aka beautiful, silver haired evidence to the contrary) is on the chat with him, Shatner boldy went where no man who values his nuts should go. He might have thought a little more carefully before speaking. Kate had a good deal of success early on in life and in her career, but she skyrocketed when she took on the role of Captain Janeway in her late 30s when - if Shatner is to believed, her beauty and vitality had left her. I'd love to know how someone whose vitality has left them manages to withstand 18 hour filming days and embue with life a character who inspired, and who continues to inspire, thousands of women to pursue careers in the sciences. Now in her late 60s, Kate is having a new generation of fans who have discovered her through Red Reznikov in Orange Is The New Black. Her popularity is not fading simply because her hair has turned silver. If you look at her IMDB profile, Kate Mulgrew has not got gone one single year since Voyager without at least one screen acting credit against her name, on top of writing 2.5 books and a busy career on stage playing iconic (and famously beautiful) women like Cleopatra and Katharine Hepburn, while raising children as a single mum. Even before Voyager, there are only 4 years since 1975 where Kate hasn't got a screen acting credit. From 1975 Bill Shatner also has 4 years without screen credits on imdb.
It angers me so much when women are viewed as disposable like this because it's utter bullshit. And people like Bill are only fuelling this mysoginistic and outdated view of women. I'm sorry Bill, but if you think women are no longer beautiful or useful past the age of 25 that says far more about you than it does about anything else. The industry does not reflect this. While it may(? I need the numbers) be true the roles may not be as abundant, if you turn on any tv show they are evidently nowhere near as scarce as this man would have us believe, and it is getting better. Even in my lifetime I am seeing this, and the stage is generally less obsessed with looks than the screen. Katharine Hepburn played Cleopatra at the age of 53. Kate Mulgrew at 55. Historically, Cleopatra was only 39 when she died. Most of the cast of Riverdale are in their 30s and are still playing teenagers.
Just to put this into a little further perspective, here are just a few of the actresses whose careers don't seem to have been hurt by a few grey hairs.
Judi Dench (88), Maggie Smith (88) Sarah Lancashire (58) Lesley Sharp (63) Suranne Jones (44) Kate Winslet (47) Kate Mulgrew (68) Judy Davis (68) Miranda Otto (55), Mädchen Amick (52) Kristin Bauer (56) Lana Parrilla (46) Anna Paquin (40) To name but a tiny handful of women who are currently working actresses over 40.
Are people like Kate Winslet, Kate Mulgrew, Mädchen Amick or Lana Parilla no longer beautiful because they're over 40? Christ no! Look at these faces!
I chose to use webcam images for this because they are real women, and women in media tend to be airbrushed into oblivion by photographers. Webcams are not flattering: they are not well lit or perfectly staged, they vary in quality, but tell the truth more than professional images. And the truth here is that all of these women who vary in age from 46-68 are absolutely stunningly uniquely beautiful.
Angela Lansbury worked til she died. So did Katharine Hepburn. Bea Arthur. Betty White. Bette Davis was another one.. . Shall I go on?
Yes a lot of the women I listed are iconic old-hollywood, and you could argue that they only got the work later in life because they were stars early in life, but did losing their skin elasticity relegate them to shitty grandma parts? No. Joan Crawford played a psychotic sister in the iconic 'Whatever Happened To Baby Jane' at 56, opposite Bette Davis (who had never been regarded as a 'beauty' in the first place) who was 57. Many of the others I listed have been in the industry from young ages, and you could argue that they only get roles now because they have been in the industry since they were fetuses. Let me introduce you to a wonderful actress called Uzo Aduba who is 42 years old. Her first IMDB credit is only in 2005 and already she's got 12 Emmys and 30 nominations The ones that have talent and who aren't destroyed by the toxic systems full of old men with mysoginistic mindsets like William Shatner, prevail. For the love of Liza lets stop this archaic masculine bullshit idea that women have a sell-by date and that their collagen is more important than their talent.
And in conclusion, which path would I go down if I had my time over? Which path do I recommend others go down?
Since I was a tiny girl, I knew more than anything, in my bones, in my blood, in my soul, that I was not someone who was cut out to live a normal life or work in an office. Without hesitation I would choose Kate's path. The closest experience I have had to living an artist's life - because I don't count being a graphic designer as anything even close to resembling an artists life - was actually being an artist for a few years when I graduated university and was floundering around not sure what to do with myself because I couldn't afford drama school, didn't want to any jobs associated with this bloody degree I'd saddled myself with, I sure as shit didn't want to work in an office, and I wasn't any good at anything else and wasn't trained for anything else. But I knew I could paint (and apparently sculpt Charles Dickens out of snow using a spoon) so I did
I worked part time jobs in retail. I wore black ballet dancing shoes that were held together with gaffertape and leaked in the rain. I rarely bought new clothes because all my money went on supplies. I got so thin I had to hold my painting jeans up with rope. But I was happier drinking tea out of a thermos with powdered milk in that studio (shed) with no heating in the middle of winter than I ever was at my posh corporate job sat in a chair that cost more than my rent, earning a good salary as a graphic designer with my bonuses and bottles of Moët and a paycheck that let me buy designer clothes, take taxis everywhere go to fancy balls, and tick boxes other people told me were important.
Despite all the security and creature comforts afforded to my by the job I was supposed to have as a fallback, I was DYING inside.
I'd shoved my dream of acting deep down by then because I had been so conditioned to believe that that instability was the ultimate thing I should avoid. I got made redundant from that job and the prospect of having to find another one like it and envisioning my future being desk-bound was like staring down the barrel of gun. I promptly had a breakdown.
When I emerged the other side of it, the voice inside me telling me that being an actor was not a want it was a need, had got so loud it was deafening, and trying to stuff it back down and silence it was no longer an option. Then covid hit. And that put a lot of things into perspective. And this is where I bring it back around to Bill Shatner.
Get some training, a vocation? Is acting not a vocation that requires training? Sure, acting isn't stable, and for each role, you have 100+ other people auditioning.. is that really any different from being a graphic designer or a copywriter or any other job for that matter? You may not book an acting job for 3 months. You may be spending 3 months as a lawyer looking for a firm. The show you're working for may not be picked up so you'll be out auditioning again? Your boss may make a dumb decision and the company folds. You may fuck up and be fired. You may be made redundant - like I was - because hiring freelancers is cheaper. Your job may be outsourced to an agency. Your department may be shut down.
You see? NOTHING in life is stable. Nothing is certain. There is absolutely no such thing as a safe dependable job any more. Maybe in William Shatner's life, where it seems it's still 1965, but it's 2023 now pal. Times have changed.
Kate Mulgrew I feel has a much better grip on the situation that transcends time. She's right - the impressionists lived in abject poverty. John Constable was a struggling artist in his lifetime because his subject wasn't popular - JMW Turner was hogging all the limelight (and customers). And now he's lauded as one of the greats and his work hangs beside Turner's in The National Gallery in London. But the point is, Van Gogh, Beethoven, Constable made choices. The stuff that exists today that inspires people and lifts people up exists BECAUSE those artists made the choice to compromise comfort for art. They chose to live a life that wasn't easy because they knew that what they had to put out into the world was more important. Would they have made the things they did if they had had a comfortable safety net? Would we have the cultural and artistic legacy we have now if they had decided 'oh I'll write my symphony later I have a print deadline for my day job' 'oh I can't paint your portrait sorry I have a powerpoint on business growth objectives at work next week I need to focus on'. I really doubt it.
How might my life have been if I had gone for it full bore from the age of 16 and applied for drama school? I don't know. Quite frankly I don't like to think about it because it hurts too much. It is very difficult to now look back at my life from the age of 37 without a significant amount of self-loathing that I have wasted so much time listening to everyone except myself. Doing everything to please others and not pleasing myself. The only plus side to come out of it is that I have lived, I have loved, I have lost, I have hurt, I have healed, I have conquered, I have challenged, I have strengthened and I have suffered; and with that comes a depth of character that I hope will serve me well as an actress, and a wisdom that I hope will serve me as a human being.
Comfortable is a dangerous place to be for an artist. If you're comfortable you're not growing. You're not learning, you're not extending yourself, and as a consequence you're not creating to your full ability. The life of a struggling artist is a cliche but I feel it exists for a reason. It's not something to aspire to, but there is a balance we artists need to find between feeding ourselves and feeding our souls in order to feed the work.
“Life is very short, and I think if you’re going to set your cap, set it mightily. Set it straight.”- Kate Mulgrew
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