Actors Need Patience:

Hi guys and welcome to the Acting Classes In Perth blog. In this session “Actors Need Patience”.

Patience is one of the key things you will need in order to survive a career in acting. It is graciously taking everything in your stride, entering the challenge and not loosing your temper. It is working with a quiet, steady perseverance towards that goal, knowing that even one small step is closer to it than you were before. In acting we all need patience, and lots of it!

The more acting that you do, the more waiting you’ll find yourself doing and it’s how you deal with this waiting that defines whether you will actually find enjoyment pursuing acting as a career or not. There’ll be times when you’ll go weeks or months without an audition or role and it’s during this time that you’ll need to figure out ways to stay patient and keep positive. If you look at many successful actors you will see that a great deal of them went through really difficult times where they had no work. Type into Google ‘successful actors who once had to live in their cars’ and the list is endless. The reason that those actors are successful today is that they possess a huge amount of patience and perseverance and they didn’t give up even when it would have been a far easier option.

As hard as it is waiting for auditions to come up, it’s probably more of a test of your patience waiting to hear whether you got the role or not. Unfortunately most of the time if you don’t get the part they won’t contact you. This makes it a bit frustrating waiting, constantly checking your email and phone, hoping that you’ll receive anything from them – even if it is that you didn’t get the role. If you do hear back from them, and you did get the part – that’s excellent! But there will be far more times when you will eventually have to realise that you didn’t get the part and you will need to let it go. It’s important to learn what you can from that audition process, figure out how you can improve but try not to over analyse everything.

Patience isn’t just required when you are trying to find an acting job. Even when you have got a part in a play/film/commercial you will still need to exercise patience; whether it’s with a picky director, an annoying cast member or just that you are a minor character who isn’t need very much. Anyone who acts does it because they enjoy acting, they enjoy the “process” of acting; unfortunately the amount of time you get to act vs. the amount of time spent waiting to act is vastly different. Which means that when you do eventually get the chance to act, enjoy it. Love every second of it. And throughout the rest of the time, when you sit waiting for another chance to act – exercise your patience.

I hope that helps. Until next time, stay safe and as always – happy acting.

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