It's Not Real Until It's Real

In my history class in like 7th or 8th grade, the history teacher made an exception for me. We would start the day with a quiz, and I would lament aloud about how I was going to fail it. Then I would get a perfect (or near perfect) score. The same would happen with major exams. The teacher said that she normally stopped students from speaking so negatively about themselves, but my performance clearly belied my own words.

Had she not mentioned this, I would have dismissed my words and actions as just a dumb bit. But looking back, I wonder if this is reflective of the attitude I have toward any acting role. When I auditioned for that pilot, I spent the two days between the audition and booking the role trying to convince myself that I had not booked it. And yesterday's commercial callback has me thinking that I just need to assume, once again, that I did not get the role. After all, I have auditioned for roles that allow me to show much more personality and acting range. This one is just facial reactions, eyes and eyebrows. And there were like six other people in the virtual waiting room for the audition. But if I book it, that would pay for the past few months of no work, and I would get a haircut, and a visit to Austin. But on the other hand, I could find out at any moment that I did not book it. So best to assume that I did not get it, and the real victory is that this casting agency now knows about me. Nothing is real until you are shooting it, and even then, the "real" part is the fun of being on set, and getting paid. What you shoot may never see the light of day.

What has been stuck in my head lately is what the director of this pilot said over zoom a few weeks ago. We discussed some of the technical aspects, that it would be a single-cam situation, and I noted that yes, that is all I have done in the past. And at some point, he referenced that I was plenty experienced for what we were doing. Which is is a point of validation that I had not given myself, in large part because I was 12 when I did most of what I have done. My mom always said that my festival win was the biggest brag, and it certainly deserves notoriety, but the feature film was the collaborative project in which I worked with a full cast and crew as the on-screen talent. Unlike my short film, that is the kind of process that required lots of planning and would have impacted the livelihoods of a lot of people had something gone very wrong.