Tag: Actors life

Planes, Trains and Audition-Ithaca

“Have you been here before?” the man at the audition asks. I think I recognise him.

“Yes. I have. I didn’t realise until I walked in, but yes. It must’ve been eight years ago. I recognise the place from back then.”

It’s a house in Kentish Town. I’m at a meeting for a stills shoot. I was going in for these before I trained, when I had a modelling agent. I’m the only person dressed in brand colours because Carol at Needham’s models taught me to do that back in the 1990’s. It helps keep my hit rate high with commercial castings. I don’t get in the room often, but I’ll usually win the director. It’s about winning the client. I’m grateful to her for the tip, even if I dumped her when I hit the 3rd year at Guildhall. Idealism over practicality. “I’m an artist now. I don’t need to do these stills shoots.” Al(ex) Barclay 2002.

This man at the casting is lovely. He must be 15 years older than me. He’s an actor too. He’s taking names and it’s like he finds an understanding with me. Then, out of nowhere, he says “Yeah, sometimes we can miss the plane.” I’ve never missed a plane in my life, says my rational brain as it feels targeted. I’m in pre-audition head. I think I might have missed the part of the conversation that led to his comment. “Yeah” I say, bewildered. He continues “I missed the plane some years ago. I had to take the train. Lots of interesting things happened to me on the train.” I’m still lost. I humour him, a little clueless but I like the guy. But I feel like there’s a layer to the conversation I’ve missed. I go in precipitately early. Apparently Tom was in front of me. Sorry Tom, I rushed up the stairs, I didn’t want to be involved in a conversation where I felt I’d missed the start, just before a casting. The casting itself was lovely.  I come out and go to my next meeting. And with a thunk, my brain clicks out of audition head and into normality and I realise he was talking in metaphor. “Sometimes you miss the plane.” To celebrity-land? To workyland? To moneyland? To whichever land he feels neither of us made it quickly. Shit. He was making friends.

I’ve been walking, though. I don’t want the train. If you walk you see what stuff actually looks like. You can touch it. You can eat interesting food, and stop to admire something beautiful. You can spend time with people who, in the train would just be flashes and in the plane would be invisible.

Train? That’s for people that are happy with being forced to eat nothing but the shit sandwiches provided by the railway. Then eventually you find yourself jettisoned in the worst part of whichever place you’re going and finally you understand that you still have a long way to go to get to wherever you think you’re going. You don’t know the buses, and everyone else on the train wants a cab too.

I’ll keep walking. I liked that dude, but I’m glad I only got his inference late. Because I refute the unspoken assumption of his metaphor. I’m not seeking to go anywhere in particular, outside of working as constantly as I can and not having to worry about this fucking boiler as the world gets colder. Where is there to go? Constant interesting work is the only aspiration to have, and on that basis I’m close to landing. My main source of hunger is the need I have to position myself so I can still work when I’m old. I shot with Sir John Mills on his last ever film. He was pretty much completely deaf and in a wheelchair, but they accommodated it because he was Sir John Mills. I need position in the industry for when I’m crazy or lame or blind etc. By then I won’t be able to rag myself stupid as a medieval king.

The guy at the audition, his chosen metaphor is transport, and he assumed I’d understand it. My chosen metaphor is the endless line of brick walls that you individually have to break with your head. I respect his optimism in thinking that there’s a destination. Although if you miss a flight or a plane, your friends can’t help. My friends and I are constantly saying “no need to bang your head on this one. I already made a hole in it. There’s a whole field on the other side. Problem is, after the field… Yep you’ve guessed it. Another wall!! And two for women!!!”

I’ll share C.P. Cavafy’s Ithaca poem about journey vs destination. Wyn Jones gave us all a copy of this when we left Guildhall. It has deepened for me over the years, particularly when I did The Odyssey with The Factory. Odysseus is just trying to get to Ithaca but his life happens on the way. He can’t get the plane, or the train. He gets the boat but it keeps sinking. Sean Connery and Jon Vangelis (who wrote the music for Blade Runner) have a version of it on YouTube. Click here if you have five minutes for something lovely. 

If not, and for those who have no sound, here’s the text. Read it out loud to yourself as if you were a lisping Scottish Rutger Hauer in the rain as Junior Indiana Han Deckard finally catches your replicant hide: 

As you set out for Ithaka
hope your road is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:
you’ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.
Hope your road is a long one.
May there be many summer mornings when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you enter harbors you’re seeing for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind—
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to learn and go on learning from their scholars.
Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you’re destined for.
But don’t hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you’re old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.
Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you wouldn’t have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.
And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.
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Depression and biscuits

Tristan is in a show about friendship, love, depression and the human spirit. It’s on until the end of this week at the Tristan Bates, a studio theatre in the West End. Gin for Breakfast. It’s a two hander and it’s great. Stephen Fry is talking on a panel this evening after the show, so all the seats for tonight were sold on the first day. I was in the audience last night, and there were a couple of empty seats. If good studio theatre is your bag, you could fill them!

It’s good casting for Tristan, if not immediately obvious. He’s in a Stockport accent and he hates people that wear cufflinks, whereas in reality he usually wears cufflinks and sounds as posh as I do. But he’s the joker in the pack, and the embodiment of self destructive hedonism, both of which roles he understands well. The collision of Tristan and Stephen Fry in the same small room – that’s two people with a deep understanding and transcendence of self-sabotage. And his co-star, Jess, brings a poise and a deeply mined, complicated and layered humanity. I like watching both of these actors work, as they’re doing it for complicated personal reasons so there’s never any sense of smug about their power. Both of them are less “daddy look at me” and more “sod off and let me work, daddy.” My favourite type of actor.

I lost a lot of time to a depression brought on by grief so now I try to catch and derail it when I sense it rear its head. Despite watching that play, today has been one of those days. I’ve had to constantly remind myself to stay positive. After that threatening red sky day of the hurricane, the rain has blown in. My manager phoned to bring news that the job with the big buyout fell through. My bank is shouting at me. But all of this is about perspective. There’s beauty in a dark rainy night, there’s plenty of joy to be had without getting a ridiculous paycheck, and happiness is where you put it.

I’m catsitting this week. I just walked in for the first time to my friend’s home to find that Meg had pulled a jar of biscuits onto the floor, smashed it, licked the jagged bit to get to the biscuits and eventually, somehow, she’d totally broken the lid off, likely by rolling around with the jar. Then she’d spread biscuits and glass and bits of metal jar fastener all over the floor. She seems totally fine despite this. When I came in she was positioned geographically as far as possible from the evidence, as if to say it was all the fault of some other cat. I hope she didn’t swallow any bits of glass. I’ll have to keep an eye on her closely, as that’s a catsitter’s nightmare.

It’s the perfect antidote though to all these self reflective darknesses and indulgent concerns. Feeling weird about your own crap? Look after something that doesn’t think and licks broken glass to get biscuits.

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Meg and I have a lot in common. We both want biscuits. We both know the biscuits are there. We’re both willing to hurt ourselves to get the biscuits. But sometimes you get the biscuits, sometimes you just eat glass.

Liberty and Trump

Day 7

“Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she

With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

130 years ago, a woman – Emma Lazarus – wrote that sonnet to help the funding of a pedestal for the new colossus that would welcome the dispossessed as they arrived at the land of the free. A colossus in the form of “la liberte”, a gift from the French, built by Eiffel. Marianne is her French name, Libertas her Roman. She stands for freedom, and for reason. She stands for the American dream. A welcoming and inspiring sight to immigrants, lighting the way with her torch, holding her book of law. Welcoming the disaffected to New York Harbour.
It seems strange that 130 years later, the same nation has sworn in a president who appears to have no concern for reason, and certainly none for immigrants. And as for his unquestioned thinking about women – to quote numerous overheard conversations today – “Just when we were getting somewhere…”

So across the nation today, and much of the world, there have been marches in peaceful protest. A chance for anyone who is concerned about the trickle down effect to mark a small statistic, while feeling a strength in numbers. If the one at the top has unexamined prejudice, will that trickle down through society and give permission for those with conscious prejudice to behave terribly? And if the one at the top has conscious prejudice, then should he be on top?
In Los Angeles, turnout was always going to be huge. I hook up with an old friend in the morning and she and I drive to Highland Park metro, knowing that driving into downtown would be a fools errand. The queue for the metro is round the block and every train that comes is packed. Which is a good sign. The atmosphere is still bright, the sun is shining, people are chatting, loads of people have brought their kids.

We queue for ages. We lose hope. We get momentarily fractious. We rejoin the queue. Eventually we decide to “London it”. There IS room in the trains, you just have to play the armpit Tetris that is played every morning across the tube network. I’m back to hapless Brit: “Goodness this is fun, it reminds me of being home in London, here if you put your elbow in my navel then I can fit the back of your head under my left knee, and if it stops suddenly just grab my beard.”
Once on the train we get to the thick of it super quickly. It’s not so much of a march by the time we’re there. More of a stand. We end up stationary at First and Broadway. Coincidentally there’s a stage right by the spot where we grind to a halt. We’ve hit the centre by mistake. A man called Charlie BeReal comes up on stage with a guitar and plays the star spangled banner. The word in the crowd is that he is one of the roadies and he built the stage. He’s just grandstanding to the biggest crowd he’s ever had. That would make sense considering he is followed by a steward making crowd control announcements too quietly, fruitlessly asking the marchers to keep moving. The crowd is not movable though. We have nowhere to move to. We have people coming towards us from 4 directions. We stay put. Chants bubble up and fade. I’m slipping in and out of American accent. Everyone is smiling. There is not a sniff of bad energy here, no impatience, no fractiousness. Lisa Marie says “That’s because it’s a women’s march,” which is a fair point. A number of speakers and activists hit the stage, as well as the mayor. There are a lot of people, and more coming all the time. It’s like being part of some huge friendly slightly geeky beast. Some of the placards are ridiculous. Lots of trumpvaginas. Lots of cultural references : “We’d prefer Joffrey” , Dumbledore quotes. A 12 year old has “I don’t want a cheeto for a president.” (Cheetos look like Wotsits.) It’s a creative, friendly, sparky, fun warm protest. And statistically there were 750,000 people in downtown LA for it.


That’s huge for such a friendly atmosphere. It felt like the Notting Hill Carnival with less beer, weed, music and stabbing. Actually, no it felt nothing like Notting Hill in the slightest. It was just lots of people. And no fighting. The poster in front of me read “Please put women in charge” and based on that protest, I’m in. If the symbol of “la republique”, the triumph of the republic, is a strong green woman that fairly welcomes the dispossessed and calls for reason and liberty, I’ll take that any day over this cruel, inward-looking, vain, entitled blustering hypocrite. With his small gropey hands and his orange sweaty face.

The calm before the storm?

Day 5. In Santa Monica there is a mock Tudor building on the corner of a street that sells Heinz Tomato Soup for 4 bucks. You can get a bottle of Fairy for 7 or even a Yorkie Bar for too much. It looks like most of the shops in Stratford upon Avon in that it’s trying to look Tudor but isn’t, and it’s called “ye olde” something. In this case “Kings Head Shoppe“. It’s rather lovely to behold. I walk in and it seems to be doing a roaring trade. Santa Monica is where all the expat Brits tend to settle and I can see why. It’s got everything. It calls itself The City of Santa Monica and it sits on the edge of the Pacific Ocean. If you walk to the end of the pier you find a sign marking the end of Route 66. 2448 miles from Chicago, the road out west. You’ve made it pilgrim. This is the end of the road. Sit yourself down and have yourself a Jammie Dodger. That’ll be 4 dollars.
The town itself has a huge centre full of shops. There are pedestrianised boulevards, coffee shops, the first bookshop I’ve seen since I arrived, and chain stores. It’s like Milton Keynes with vomiting stegosaurus fountains instead of concrete cows. So I go shopping. There are no yoga mats for less than 50 bucks anywhere in Venice, but of course one for 10 in T (J?!) Maxx which I snag as I’ve taken to doing yoga every morning. When in Rome. Then I book myself a ticket for the matinee of Lalaland at 3.45. I call it research. And maybe it will cheer me up with the inauguration looming. Armed with ticket and mat I wander towards the ocean to prevent a shopping spree. The sun is blazing after a night full of rain, and I want to put my hand in the water. But I get distracted. There’s a bloody great big promenade with a funfair on it where Route 66 ends. Ferris wheels, roller coasters, fortune tellers, games. I burn 2 dollars in a ball shooting machine and get 500 tickets which nets me a vile fluffy pink tiger eating someone’s heart. Clutching it by the neck as a toddler would I become fascinated by the Pacific. I love the sea. Even in London I live by water. But this ocean… I can’t even contemplate the distances. I watch a man fishing at the end of the pier. He keeps pulling them in and chucking them back. Too small. But there are plenty of fish in this sea. My thoughts sink into it. I get out my phone and track ahead on the map. Page after page of scroll and then you barely miss New Zealand. I imagine striking out into it in a canoe. Vast.


Pulling myself away I go and immerse myself in Lalaland. I can tell you now after 5 days, it’s hard hitting documentary realism. Once again I’m lost in fantastic reverie. Here’s to the ones who dream. By the time I leave the cinema I’ve cried so much my beard is soaking wet. I was going to walk home, but I’m a wreck, and uber pool is 2.99. Trump gets in tomorrow. The cold is blowing in across the desert and tomorrow it will rain. My uber driver says “I honestly keep hoping I’m about to wake up from a terrible dream.” Ugh. Back to reality. What I wouldn’t pay for a comforting can of Heinz tomato soup.

Headshots and mirrors

Day 4 and I’m beginning to miss the easy friendships I left behind. The golden people where you can simultaneously love, mock, comfort and challenge one another. Now I am surrounded by strangers and have not carved out those furrows. There ARE old friends but the weight of years apart pulls heavy. Today was admin. Photos. I dislike looking at myself in a mirror so it’s been incredibly valuable to crowdsource opinion on my headshots. Thanks anyone who helped with that. I’ve been thinking about that tendency in me not to like to look at myself, in the context of what I am doing and where I am. What the hell am I doing drinking in LA at 27? Well, I’m neither drinking nor 27 fuckit. But I’m here. I always used to say “I’m the opposite of LA.” “Oh I’m not the type of person who goes out there.” I’ve said that many times. I suddenly wondered why. And I realised that, as much as anything else, it’s been informed by my love of words. I’m the opposite of LA. Simply because I’m AL. Yep, that’s the sort of shit I do to myself. So I had to come out here. To look at myself. To see if there is anything in LA for AL.

 

Everything here costs money. It’s not very forgiving. There’s a hierarchy of deserving based on ability to pay. It drives one to want to make more money. It drives ambition. The undercurrent is “there’s a huge amount of money here. If you can’t afford it, get some of it, climb the ladder, play the game, that’s what we do. Dance bear dance.” And yet somehow it feels like people are dancing for themselves in the mirror, not for the sultan. And perhaps I need to dance in the mirror for a bit. I need to be able to look hard at myself to properly take ownership of what I am trying to achieve professionally, which is career longevity and continuous challenge. And people do that here.
I fit right in to this place spiritually, in that it is as confused as I am. What am I? A practising christianobuddhist greek pantheist. Utterly pretentious, doubly confused. It probably make my tinder profile here go bananas if I put it. There’s a hindobuddhist palmreading tarotovoodaic psychic ayurvedic astrologicoptic herbalist medium on every street corner peddling massively conflicting ideas for 10 bucks. “Do three hail shivas every morning while banging a gong with a chicken leg and chewing fennel.”
This morning 20 women of all ages with bright floral lycra went through asana to the soundtrack of one grunting man at the back wearing sheer Bikram pants and feeling like he’d somehow teleported into one of those seventies movies his mother used to watch. He hasn’t found his groove yet, nor his people, nor his area. But he’s trying to remember who he is through the prism of getting up every morning and saying yes to everything.
I’m glad I’m here, and equally glad that I am not enmeshed in the game of here. I want to play it a bit. I do want to go into a studio and have a couple of meetings and see that side of it. But I haven’t buried my expectation in it, which makes me feel like I have perspective. Today has been admin so no walking. Normal service will probably resume tomorrow.

This beautiful shot was taken by David Drew.

Day 3 – How to cross town for cheap…

Day 3 and I’m in West Hollywood. There’s a little island of expat Brits who have a regular breakfast subsidised by Air New Zealand. They all meet on Tuesday morning to have bacon and eggs, tiny little pots of baked beans, bottomless tea, and chats about the British things that British people chat about. Traffic, weather, admin, accommodation, family. It’s a big group and has been running for years. I flew Air New Zealand so perhaps the subsidy will offset the flight a little. Getting there involves two buses through rush hour. I’m worried about the expense of an uber. As it happens I travel entirely free. On the first bus I artlessly produce my wodge of twenty dollar bills and ask if there’s change. The driver laughs at me in the way of people who can operate the machine. “I’ve been using it for ages, I know there’s no change, he should know what I know.”

A friendly passenger pities my haplessness and gives me $1.75. She advises that I go to a laundromat and get a load of quarters. I thank her profusely, and walk embarrassed past grinning strangers. 20 stops later I have to get on a connecting bus and there are no laundromats in sight, so still no change. Feeling slightly ashamed of myself I duplicate my behaviour and sure enough it yields the same result. Taking my seat in another grinning bus it occurs to me that I could probably travel for free all month if I could keep the act fresh. Until I get a repeat customer and then I get shot. Best go to the laundromat. But the genial lost Englishman thing evidently has traction.
Breakfast involves a lot of talking and people trying to establish if I’m important. I hate to disappoint so I remain elusive high status and leave abruptly. They ask me to get involved in something called The Toscars, which could be amusing and fits my timing. The details are hazy. I walk lots of hot streets and settle in a coffee shop full of sunglasses and sandals. It’s springtime in Hoxton! It’s ALWAYS springtime in Hoxton here, kids. I organise to meet an old friend. He comes round in his car. For the first time in a while I have a conversation that is not informed by subtext. “This place is weird, it has no centre.” I venture. “That’s because YOU are the centre. It wouldn’t work if there was an actual centre. Wherever YOU are, that’s the centre, for everyone here.” We talk about Trump. “Do you think there’ll be a protest here on inauguration?” “This is Hollywood. There’s no politics.” We cover a lot of ground in a short space of time and he buys me a steak and blue cheese sandwich which almost makes me cry. “The medium food here is the best in the world.” It’s also 16 bucks. Last night I saw a basic loaf of sourdough in a supermarket for 7.50. I’m going to be eating a lot of sardines. My friend drops me back at the coffee shop in time to catch the falling sun. It drops early. I sit listening to people offer to send each other their resumé, meet with someone else and give them mine, and get an uber pool all the way home for $2.50. No idea how that happened. Travel money makes no sense here. There’s a lot that makes no sense. But at least I get the sunset from the uber.

Day 2 – Checking my privilege in a beautiful place

Dawn day 2 in the crazy house this morning saw me stripping my bed to the soundtrack of roosters and a little yapdog outside the window that seemed endlessly concerned by my presence and desperate to warn everyone. I loved the guys there though. It’s a huge family originally from Mexico – 8 brothers and sisters and their sick mother, with all their partners, pets and habits. They were all working multiple jobs and renting out their space, crashing early in the evening and getting up before dawn, which fitted my jet lag well. And they had made a beautiful house, and were generous. They positively forced me to eat all the bagels I could manage, with endless cream cheese, and if I ever ran into them they were eager to chat. But the area was a bit weird and I went for a walk last night and it did feel pretty stark and deserted. So I went with my instinct and moved to Venice, to a hostel.

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Venice is very different. They seem to have canals that are entirely pretentious and serve no purpose except to live on. There are still small dogs, but carried in baskets or halfheartedly walked by stick thin twentysomethings with sunglasses and platforms. There’s yoga on every block and you’re more likely to find Matcha than coffee. I’ve been walking around thinking of the guys in that church. I move area just by hitting a few buttons on my iPad. They are scared they’ll lose their house in the area I moved from. While I’m in a coffee shop looking at pictures of myself their kids are shooting one another.

I walked up the side of a river in Glendale yesterday and it was like a shanty town for the dispossessed, some of whom had brought all their possessions to live for a while between a freeway and a trickling urban river. Some of them had brought skis, fire grates, cases and cases of possessions, beautiful curtains for shelters. Others had shopping trolleys packed with all familiar household objects. Some were cooking jambalaya with good implements on open fires. Others were smoking pot in filthy tents. One lady was fishing, many people were washing things in the river. I guess they aren’t moved along and the area is just used as a cycle track. Certainly I was the only man walking that didn’t live there. I wondered about all their stories, how they had ended up there, how they found their happiness, what might happen to them. Here’s me with my flat in Chelsea and my job making stories, and these people might have once had much more, and now you can walk past them and almost not see them unless you look.

After checking my privilege I went to meet a lovely man called Ryan to talk about movies and ambition on a roof garden while his miniature husky inspected us and we sipped espresso. Then I walked to muscle beach to see hulking brutes pose for photos, and did some yoga. Soon I’ll go back to my comfortable bed in a room full of bunks. The weather today has been gorgeous, like springtime in London. I’m very very lucky to be here, and to be able to share this with you.