Changing Times

One of the things about life as an actor that's always fascinated me is that things can change overnight. When people used to tell us that it was a very insecure profession and that we really ought to get a proper job, we could say that there was always the possibility the phone would ring tomorrow. However, if you were a plumber, my favourite analogy, or an office worker, relocating yourself would suddenly be much more complicated if you were out of work. As people who don't have a routine, we may value a bit of steadiness, but change is good. I spent the last two weeks having an adventure, driving around Iceland with my partner, something I've always considered doing. Everything changed daily; the landscape, from mountains to lava scapes to waterfalls to icebergs, was brilliant and magnificent beyond belief. Every night, the hotel changed, never unpacking our cases properly but just opening them to take out the things we needed and moving on the next day. I think if the option of having a luxury trailer had been available, I might have taken it. Although we saw several camper vans that had left the road and found themselves in ditches due to strong winds of up to 136 miles an hour, perhaps our hotel choice and our 4x4 Toyota RAV4 hybrid were the correct way forward. And then I got back expecting to settle into a pattern of pre-organised meetings and a quiet summer before a lot of work in the autumn. Things changed within 12 hours. I was lucky enough to go for two in-town in-person meetings, a rarity these days. I was nervous, thinking I'd forgotten how to do them. I was offered one job while in the room without reading, and I had great fun reading for the other job. They may still come up with an offer. But suddenly, now I'm going for wig fittings, costume fittings, and trying to barter my pre-organised engagements with a filming schedule that starts in nine days and is pretty full-on for three weeks. People say that about actors, don't they? When we're out of work, we want the job; when we want the work, we need time to do our lives. I never fail to be amused by the following story. A psychologist was conducting behavioural experiments. He had a white room with no windows, filled with a large pile of bones. The architect's dog was let into the room, and the dog arranged the bones into a perfectly balanced, equilibric structure that stood proudly in the centre of the room. The mathematician's dog entered the room and laid the bones out into a beautifully balanced algebraic equation, and then the actor's dog entered the room. It shagged the other two dogs, ate all the bones and asked for the afternoon off. So here's to the work… …and here's to the afternoon off.