claytoncast

A Day Off.  Technically today is my first day of unemployment for quite a while. I finished a seven-month run in a soap opera last Wednesday.  There was a certain amount of relief in doing so as it hasn't always been the easiest or the best of times. Thursday, Friday and even Saturday have managed to fill themselves up with freelance jobs, so today, sitting at my desk, I'm rather relishing the fact that I haven't had to get out of my pyjamas and I'm catching up on accounts, invoicing and general paperwork. It's the sort of thing I quite enjoy. "A tidy desk is a tidy mind" is a maxim I remember from my school days, and while I may have a mind that is very cluttered round the edges, I have a nice clean space in the middle in which to work.  If I were not working tomorrow, I'd also enjoy that day as time free. Probably less so than today, but I might get down to a few household chores. If I were not working on Wednesday, I would be starting t...

It’s Showcase Time! That heady season when the drama schools not only invite us in to look at their latest spawn, but actually thrust them out into the wide world to occupy the stages of the West End for a lunchtime and deliver to a motley collection of agents and industry professionals their carefully picked monologues in return for a stuffed cherry tomato and a glass of warm white wine. It is at this time that most graduates forget that they actually want to be actors. Now they just want to be an agent’s client. For many, getting an agent looms larger than getting a job. Yes, it is helpful to get an agent, but it’s not the be all and end all. Many years ago, on a lunchtime in the late seventies, we all trouped down from Manchester Polytechnic (Oh How that word dates me!) to the Garrick theatre in London to do our agents showcase. Afterwards we mingled hesitantly in the bar, under strict instructions to let the agents get to the food first! As if they don’t eat! No one ap...

I can't remember the last time I actually had to write a CV. These days I update my credits, or what I been up to, on my webpage, and my agent keeps an up-to-date CV as something that they can send out when they're suggesting me for things. A simple one-page document that tells people what I've been in, who I have worked with in terms of directors, and when I did it. With a lot of credits, it's easy to be able to be selective, and keeping the document on one page makes sure that it always gets read. It wasn't always so easy to keep my CV this simple. In fact I seem to remember  times in my career when I have had many many less credits, and yet those were the times when there seemed too much to include. Such as on leaving drama school. At this point in your career you're very keen to sell yourself. To whoever and for whatever. Therefore you don't want to rule out any options, and you're frightened that anything you don't mention on your CV ma...

 One really nice aspect of this year has been getting out to meet lots of 2014 drama graduates. Fully fledged caterpillars ready to turn into dramatic butterflies once their graduation happens at some point between May and July this year. Because the day after their graduation is the day the acting stops. The acting that they have dreamed of doing since they were small, that they have been doing throughout their school years, and drama school years, suddenly will not be fed to them on a plate and will only happen if they get out there and get themselves a job. That's when acting becomes not just a passion, but a business, and like any business, you need to have objectives. This week I spent an hour with the final year graduating students at ALRA. An old friend of mine, Clive Duncan, is the principal there and he introduced me to sea of expectant faces late on a Thursday afternoon. Whenever I stand or sit in front of a new group of people, I always feel that they are surveying...

It's always a bit disappointing on a day when you're geared up to film, and you end up doing nothing. At the ripe old age of five days away from my fifty seventh birthday, I should know that, but it still came as an immense disappointment after a two and a half hour train journey up to Liverpool, changing into costume, popping into make up, and sitting in the green room, when second assistant director Jamie came in with that look on his face that I could read instantly that said "your scene's been pulled". The fact that the cancellation was compounded by a false alarm that the scene was actually going to be shot and which came after I got out of costume and had my hand on the door of at taxi to leave the studio didn't make things any better, but these things happen. Even on the best planned shoots, scene orders can change and you can suddenly have an awful lot of time on your hands. It's not a skill that they teach at drama school, but making the ...