Table Read...y, Set, Go

Today, we received a time, date, and location for the table read for this television production. Until now, I had familiarity from child actor days, but I never worked as a main cast member on a television show. I was in a comedy pilot earlier this year, but we had no table read; it was fairly amateur. But this is with a studio that already has other productions underway in multiple genres.

It is of course just a pilot with no guarantee of being picked up. But hypothetically, if it does get picked up with a SAG interim agreement, my understanding is that we would eventually be retroactively paid according to whatever agreement SAG makes with the AMPTP. So if it got picked up and was a hit, I would be able to make a living off of it.

But at the least, this pilot should provide footage of me doing some dramatic acting for my reel. And since the last pilot I was in prompted my mom to ask "Did you forget what you learned in your acting classes?", I will benefit from having actual acting on my reel rather than just me being zany or overly expressive.

Also, I am a little nervous about memorizing lines! I got through med school through a ridiculous amount of memorizing and applying that memorization into real life situations, and even when I performed standup, I did it with almost exactly a word-for-word delivery. But still, this is the professional actor thing. I have to memorize the lines, get the character's motivations figured out, apply those motivations to lines as needed, and then be ready for everything to change on me when we actually shoot. Because on the shoot day, your scene partner may bring something different to it that changes the delivery, or a technical issue may be present so you are acting to a piece of brick rather than another actor, or any number of things. On the short horror shoot I did last year, we had a dog, two stray kittens, a very aggressive vole or mouse thing, not to mention a rattle snake, and all except for the snake seemed desperate to be in a shot. At one point, when the cat would not leave, we later used a yoga mat as a green screen to splice in where the cat was supposed to walk out.

For this production, it involves police, so who knows what will be happening with regard to firearms.