The Stereotypes About Actors I Commonly Hear - Part 1
by Ashley Griffin, Stage Directions
In the past few months, I’ve found myself in the company of a great many non-actors. Actually, the non-entertainment industry…ers but, well, acting seems to be the area where they have the most preconceived notions.
In fact, acting seems to be the area where most people whether they’re in the entertainment industry or not seem to have the greatest judgments. An unfortunately common experience I’ve had is that of walking into a room of industry members and getting a completely different response depending on whether I’m introduced first as an actor or a writer/director. If introduced as a writer/director I am immediately assumed to be intelligent, savvy, and generally on an equal par with those in the room. If introduced as an actor I am dumb, naïve, and unknowledgeable about business in any way.
This is certainly not ALWAYS the case. I have many wonderful friends, both industry and not, for whom this couldn’t be further from the truth. But unfortunately, I have come to experience this more and more when I meet new people. And I want to address it.
These are the stereotypes I hear most commonly perpetuated:
Actors are crazy, self-centered, overly emotional drama queens with potentially huge psychological issues.
I think actors are some of the most well-adjusted, self-knowledgeable people on the planet. What do you think we do in acting school? Aside from technically developing our “instrument” (our bodies, and voices,) acting class is basically one giant psychology course – intensely studying both yourself and the rest of the world. No, not therapy session, psychology course. The number one major (for those actors who choose to study something else in college,) dual major or minor for actors in college is psychology. Hey, even if there are therapeutic aspects it’s therapy where the patient comes out the other side incredibly self-aware and empathetic.
One thing you can never really say about actors is that we’re repressed. We all have issues, but actors generally know what they are, and have good ways of dealing with them. Actors cry, we laugh, we get angry, because at the end of the day our job description – the thing we get paid money to do, is to get onstage or in front of a camera and experience those things in front of an audience so that we can help the audience face them too. We have to get up in front of hundreds, if not thousands of people, and just BE. Become vulnerable. Show those things to strangers that they may not be comfortable even showing to themselves. If we weren’t well adjusted, we’d be locked up.
So in order to do that onstage, we have to be comfortable with ourselves in real life. That means we often experience life in big ways. We may be that friend who always laughs loudest, or lets others see us cry when we’re upset. It doesn’t mean we’re a “drama queen,” and it certainly doesn’t mean we’re faking emotion. It means we’re comfortable being in touch with it. And yeah, that can be off-putting. I wouldn’t want to be a non-actor at an actor’s party. But think about what we have to do every day. We have to confront our own pain in the face – in rehearsal, in front of strangers. For some even in the national or world spotlight. Yes, sometimes we may need some hand-holding in rehearsal. We may need you to be sensitive to our feelings. Because that’s what we’re being asked to do – FEEL all day long.
I think there's a general assumption that being emotional and being intelligent are mutually exclusive. Either you're ruled by your heart, or your head. Since actors are associated with being emotional the same way, say, lawyers are associated with being intellectual (and if we were having this same discussion about breaking down lawyer stereotypes we would be making the case for them not just being thinking heads. Seriously - in the musical "Legally Blonde" there's a lyric that goes: "Don't lawyers feel love too? Even if they do...") Actors are not unthinking wells of emotion. And we couldn't act if we were. We're in touch with our emotions, we're comfortable with them, but we're not ruled by them. We craft them. We're analytically emotional. Usually the first week, or at least several days of rehearsal are dedicated to "text analysis" - literally intellectually analyzing the text and making conscious choices about what the character is feeling, and doing and what we need to do to bring that across. It requires a great deal of empathy, yes, but also intelligence.
Regarding the psychological issues – no way. I don’t think you can have deep, unresolved or addressed psychological issues and be a healthy actor. I personally find “Black Swan” a bit hilarious in the sense that someone having an actual mental breakdown would not physically be able to get on stage and perform “Swan Lake”. The same is true with acting onstage or on camera.
Yeah, sometimes we can create drama. But so can everyone. Office drama can be pretty brutal. And, honestly, most of the time things are rather calm in our real lives. I mean we have enough drama onstage…. getting it all out onstage sometimes means that our personal lives are far more calm, peaceful, and well-adjusted than the average person. I said sometimes…
Actors are vain, and obsessed with their looks.
The harsh truth is – if you’re an actor, you’re judged every day on how you look. It’s just a fact of life. And I don’t mean that everyone has to be skinny (I know someone who was harassed and criticized for losing weight when they were playing Tracy in “Hairspray”).
In general, I do think the entertainment industry has gotten slightly better in regards to representing different kinds of bodies, and beauty in general but the fact of the matter is, if you don’t look a certain way, you don’t work (whatever that “certain way” is. But that doesn’t come from the actors – that comes from everyone around us. Agents, casting directors, directors, producers, heck, even corporate sponsors. The fact is, being an actor is like being in advertising, only the product being sold is – YOU. Think of all those meetings in Mad Men where they talk about redesigning an ad, using a different color background, and going with a different “style.” Yup. That’s you. Everything from your hair color and cut to your weight, to the clothes and make-up you wear affect your ability to be hired. At several theater conservatories on the first day of senior year, guys are told to gain thirty pounds of muscle, and girls are told to lose thirty pounds before showcase. As a boilerplate statement.
Sure, there are actors who truly think they’re “all that” - but that’s a human problem, not an actor problem. Most actors are concerned about their looks to the degree that it’s just something they have to maintain for their job.
A disclaimer: I think this issue is one of the big differences between NY and LA actors. I’m making a generalization, but in NY most of the acting jobs available are theater-related. To be onstage, you MUST have some degree of talent. You are up there eight times a week and you have to be good. This is even more pronounced in musical theater. Sure, people get cast because of how they look, but at the end of the day you have to be able to sing and dance well, and there’s no getting around it. In LA, most of the work is TV and film-related where it is possible to get a decent performance out of someone with no skills whatsoever thanks to the wonders of editing. You may not consider the kinds of performers who get jobs just because of how they look regardless of the fact that they have no talent serious actors, but the fact remains that serious actors are going to have to compete with them for jobs – in which case getting cast will COMPLETELY depend on how they look. Imagine if to get a job as a teacher, or a lawyer, or a doctor your looks were taken into account, sometimes ahead of your qualifications.
In general, I would say this makes most actors, at least somewhat insecure about their looks. Not vain. There’s a reason we take so long to get ready for an audition. And it’s not because we like to. We’d far rather be able to go to an audition with no makeup, wearing sweats, and get to be judged purely on our technical abilities. Not the way we look.
Actors are dumb
Actors are not dumb. Non-actors who just want to be famous frequently are. I feel like this stereotype comes from the fact that actors are almost always hired to fill a pre-prescribed role. Often they’re not a creator on a project. They audition, are hired, and then are, to a greater or lesser degree, told what to do - therefore they get a reputation as someone who needs to be held by the hand, ordered around, and are basically on par with a trained puppy. That’s a difficulty of the situation. Not our intelligence level.
In fact, unless you’re dealing with a great director, our opinion is often of no importance. The show has already been created by the time we come on board, and if there’s something that needs to be changed, well, the creative team already has a rapport and a history with the show and, since most actors are not writers or directors, their opinion is more apt to slow down the process. Not to mention the fact that there is typically ONE writer, ONE director, ONE composer, and DOZENS of actors. Theater is not a democracy. If it were, no show would ever open.
That means actors often can’t be outright smart.
Let’s take into account, for example, those shows every actor has been a part of where one or often several members of the production team don’t know what they’re doing. I’ve had directors who refuse to set blocking, don’t show up to rehearsal, or downright haven’t even read the script. (MAJOR note: I’m talking about obvious, indisputable incompetence. This is not to be taken as an axiom that whenever you don’t like a director, you should assume they’re bad and do your own thing. That’s being an incompetent actor.) In those cases, the actors are directing themselves. That takes serious skills and great intelligence to pull off.
A potential grey area here are “green” actors. “Green” actors are actors who do not have much experience in the business. Typically they are fresh out of school and, though they may be talented, don’t really know the ins and outs of the business yet. In the most stereotypical sense, these are the girls who show up for a shady casting session in some guy’s living room where there’s nothing but a couch and a video camera and don’t realize that something might be off. Yes, at one time we were all green. We may not have all been naïve (especially about a casting call in a shady apartment), but we were all innocent when we started – and that’s true of anyone starting out in any profession. The bottom line is: innocent does NOT equal stupid. If it did, you'd have to say most people under the age of fourteen are stupid. We all learn the ropes sooner or later. If we were stupid, we never would.
Actors know how to save and invest money. Often they start a retirement fund well before their non-actor peers. They know how to live frugally (one of my friends joked after the economy crashed that actors would be the only ones to make it through because they were the only demographic with true survival skills.) They are emotionally generous and know that there are more important things in life than financial success. They read. They frequent libraries. They are culturally and artistically educated, and savvy and have probably seen more art than any other population demographic. In their heads, they hold some of the greatest writing of all human existence and more music than any iPod. They understand contractual negotiations. They can convincingly play the most intelligent people in the world, not to mention convincingly pretend to have the most intellectual jobs – understanding the jargon, and basic operating procedures of lawyers, doctors, scientists, and presidents. To be a true actor you must be knowledgeable about, literally, everything.
You cannot be a true actor without being intelligent.