The Myth of the Bad Actor: No, You Weren’t Rejected Because You Suck
It’s a common enough trope: you have a character who works as an actor, but you need them to not be finding work. So, obviously, you make them a bad actor. Dreadful, even. The worst imaginable. Or, the flip side, you have a character who works as an actor whom you need to succeed. Thus, cue the montage of terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad auditions from side characters that finally ends with our protagonist descending upon the stage like an angel of the arts.
The problem, of course, is that real life isn’t that easy.
I’ve been involved with different forms of acting for the vast majority of my life. I started in community theatre in elementary school, worked on the sets of my mother’s films in high school, and pursued a theatre major in college. And the thing about acting is that, inherently, it comes with rejection. The first time I was rejected from a show after years of acting at my “everybody gets a part” community theatre, a director I knew pulled me aside and told me “Congratulations! You’re a real actor now.”
The fact of the matter is that everybody gets rejected. But from watching television and movies, you would be very likely to think that every good actor rises to stardom and the only actors who are unsuccessful are terrible. I consider myself lucky in that, fairly early on in my acting life, I was able to work on several projects as an assistant director. Directing in some form is an experience I strongly recommend for any actor for a plethora of reasons; but chief among them is getting to witness the casting process.
See, the audition montage in High School Musical would tell us that the process of casting is thus: if you have one part to cast and ten actors auditioning, nine of the actors will be awful and you’ll cast the single actor who doesn’t suck. The reality that directing exposes you to, though, is that you’re more likely to have one part to cast and ten actors who are all very, very good at what they do.
So… what do you do? None of them are automatically disqualified on the basis of being comically horrible. How do you decide between ten equally skilled actors?
The answer is that it comes down, very often, to the little things — and some of them are things you can’t change. This can often come out in outright bigotry and discrimination. That subject alone warrants entire articles that have already been written by people more qualified than me, so that’s not what I’m touching on today.
What I’m touching on is the minute details that you might not even think about when you’re on the other side of the table. Maybe you played the part a little happy and someone else played the part a little sad, and they liked the sad better. Maybe another actor can speak French and you can’t, and they think it might be fun to add French to the role. Maybe your hair color or eye color or height are just a little off.
And sometimes, it’s not even something as big as that. Sometimes it comes down to several equally talented actors, and the director chooses their actor based on differences in performance so subtle that many people might not even catch it.
And all of this is terrible and wonderful and frustrating and relieving all at once. Because yeah, losing out on a part over something small sucks. But at the same time, when rejections can feel like personal failures, I think it’s important to remember to take a step back and realize that rejection does not a bad actor make. You weren’t comic relief making way for the star of the show to audition. You were a talented actor among dozens of talented actors all trying to fit into a role for a single person. That’s all.
