Most people, if they’re lucky, only do three or four job interviews in their life. A couple of shifts here, a rung or two up the ladder there, and before you know it you’re in a swivel chair with a pension scheme and a lanyard. Lovely.
For actors, it’s different. We do them all the time. Weekly, sometimes daily. Except we don’t call them interviews. We call them auditions. These days, that often means a self-tape — two syllables that strike more fear into the average actor than “tax return”.
Picture the scene: you, in front of the only bit of white wall in your flat that isn’t cracked, crooked or adorned with a poster of Les Mis. You’re trying to summon the emotions of a broken man while balancing your phone on a stack of cookbooks and praying the neighbour’s dog doesn’t start yapping during your big moment.
You send it off, you wait, you hear nothing. Then weeks later you’re watching telly with a digestive and a cuppa when there it is — the very job you auditioned for, being played perfectly well by someone else. Nobody thought to mention it.
There is now a marvellous online service where casting directors can tick a box to say whether a part’s been cast. Progress, apparently. To me it feels like your undertaker posting on Facebook: “Funeral went ahead. Sorry you couldn’t make it.”
I’d made my peace with all this. These days I just lob my self-tapes into the void like a message in a bottle and if one ever washes back ashore, I treat it as a bonus.
Which is why the last few weeks have felt so strange. I actually went for an interview in person. Imagine! Other people. In a room. We chatted, we laughed, I read the script, they seemed to like me. They even rang my agent afterwards to say how much they’d enjoyed it and to keep them posted about my availability. Which is the acting equivalent of a suitor saying, “I’ll definitely call.”
And then… silence. Three weeks of it.
In any other job, it wouldn’t happen. If you went for a job at Greggs and three weeks later they still hadn’t told you whether you’d be rolling sausage rolls or not, you’d assume the shop had burnt down. But in my profession, this is considered quite normal.
What’s maddening is not the thought I haven’t got the job. I could live with that. I could have lived with it the next day, last week, yesterday. What rankles is the nothingness. The suspicion they’re trying someone else out for size but keeping me gently simmering on the back burner, like a pan of soup they’re not sure they fancy.
And of course, as a freelancer, there’s no HR department, no grievance procedure, no kindly person in a cardigan saying “leave it with me, love.” Just the courtesy of a reply. Which, like common politesse, seems to have gone the way of the milkman and the Radio Times delivery boy.
I still want the job, of course. But my enthusiasm has ebbed, and not just because I suspect they’ll go for someone else. It’s because by saying nothing, they’ve said quite a lot. They’ve said what they think I’m worth.
And I know I’m worth more.
It’s not the rejection that stings. It’s the silence.
And silence, let’s face it, is bloody rude.
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