Happy For You
Being happy for your friends who are also actors is part wonderful, in that the miraculousness at your joint-fulfilling prophecy is actually coming true, and part tipping point to your own existential dread. Wonderful, primarily, because you get to live vicariously through them on the internet and over coffee when you actually meet up, in person, once a year and they tell you about the magic of the sets and backstage gossip and afterparty tales and you remind them of the time in acting school you did a scene together from an American classic and butchered it so badly they got hammered and made out with a homeless guy later that night and then they don’t see you for another year. But the real truth is that no matter how happy you are for them you’ll always have a grinding sense that they too will drift away into that mysterious ether of consistent acting work that seems so excruciatingly untouchable that you can’t help but also always feel so incurably envious. It’s the Yin and Yang of being an out-of-work actor. Like everything in life, it’s great when you’re losers together, staggering in and out of dive bars like rats to a downtown kitchen, however; you’ll always exist in a realm that is completely reliant on knowing that they too are not working and once one of you, hopefully you not them (sorry not sorry), gets that golden goose of a role it’s game over chum.
This is made even more gruesome by the reliance we, as artists, have on social media. From castings to industry news to spamming directors with your unpublished scripts, it’s important to be informed (knowledge is power) but being informed means being hyper aware of everything and everyone who is working slash is in production and, in turn, being even more self aware that you are, in fact, not working. This creates an endless loop that wears you down until it feels as if you will forever exist in the childhood version of yourself that had other actors posters on the wall but, instead, it’s the adult version constantly staring at your colleagues faces in articles for Vanity Fair or the Belfast telegraph who also happen to be 5 years younger than you. Welcome, once again, to the childhood trauma every actor feels and why they turned to being an actor in the first place - they weren’t invited to the cool kids party. Not being invited to the CKP (abbreviating it makes it feel like a members club and, therefore, less pathetic) in school was basically like being told you don’t exist in the eyes of anyone that really matters, bar God, who, as we were told in our uber Christian Northern Irish school, loves everyone bar my brown dad because he was Hindu and according to the religious education teacher he doesn’t belong in heaven’s CKP. I’ll get to where the religious studies class experiences correlate in another post. So, yeah, not being invited to the alco pops and truth or dare party as a pre pubescent 12 year old was definitely on par and so we (I) became actors to garner the attention and validation we so desperately craved by sharing these very traumas with everyone or anyone who would pay us.
It’s sobering to realise the immortal words of Bowling for Soup were spot on because high school never ends, at least not in our industry. We’re still not invited to the CKP’s and, what’s worse is that, more often than not, I’m not even aware the party happened until the wrap pics go up while I’m drinking the dregs of my off-brand instant coffee on the toilet of my flat-share on a Monday at 11am. All in all, my dearest, successful, lavish artist-life leading friends, we’re happy for you. Although, just know, that despite the many, great, deserved reviews and cover stories and instagram mentions…I will never stop telling people you tongue wrestled bridge guy while drunkenly spitting bars of Shepherd beside the M train in our early 20’s.
Cameron Tharmaratnam is a South Asian-Irish actor/writer/filmmaker based in London.
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