2:26 am - Tues 7.08.2008
I Can Relate

A couple weeks ago, I did a casting workshop with Jason Kennedy, an associate from Susan Bluestein's office (Their big ongoing thing is NCIS).

It was a very discouraging night.

I shouldn't have been there in the first place, because I'd seen this guy before (I think that night was actually the third time I'd seen him, which amounts to wasting his time and mine. As distinctive as I am - I'm just talking about my looks here - my seeing any of these people more than once is throwing money down the toilet, more about disorganization and desperation on my part than anything else).

Anyway, JK talked for a long time, then when he finally started handing out scenes, I realized I knew in advance who he was going to pair me with; there was only one other ugly middle-aged guy there, and sure enough, we were paired together (I might, on occasion, have interactions with attractive people in real life, but almost never when doing scenes at casting workshops).

I was discouraged about this pairing from the get-go, because the guy had asked a particularly stupid question during the Q&A, suggesting that he was 1) Stupid, 2) Really inexperienced, or 3) All Of The Above.

And none of that was good for me.

And JK was obviously not very invested in getting the casting of the scene right (Maybe because he was annoyed with me for wasting his time); he had a distinctly "eeny-meeny-miny-mo" tone when he handed us a scene from the show and assigned us our parts, as if we were interchangeable, when we really weren't (My ugly partner was Mark Harmon, while I was the Guest Star, a sheriff helping NCIS out who, in the interrogation scene we were doing, has now become a suspect in the case).

After we did the scene once, JK redirected my partner, had us start again, then stopped him, redirected him some more, then stopped him again...and never got what he wanted (Which was basically to have my partner project a sense of control and command in the scene, since he was putting the screws to me during an interrogation).

Because he just didn't have it to give; I should have been playing "Gibbs" (The Mark Harmon role), not because I'm so darned good-looking, but because I could have effortlessly projected what JK was looking for, and the scene would have worked.

It was very frustrating (Thinking about it now, I wish I'd had the guts to say, "Can we switch parts? It would work better that way").

If the scene had worked, I might not have been so jealous of the good scenes other people were getting to do (Though even then, the scene we'd had was, in comparison to some of the other scenes, pretty trite, formulaic stuff).

I'm often jealous of the scenes other people get to do, because I rarely play scenes involving a personal relationship.

I'm never a boyfriend, and rarely the husband. But beyond that, beyond portraying romantic relationships (Which apparently ugly people can't have), I hardly ever play a scene where I have a personal relationship of any kind with the other person in the scene - not friends, not relatives, nothing.

And that frustrates me to no end, because if playing loving relationships is out, and if playing personal connections in general are out, what the fuck am I ever going to get to do?

I don't want to be trapped in one line co-star parts the rest of my life.

previous - next