At a dinner party with several actors last week, I tossed out an idea I’d been toying with for my column: The Five Stages of Grief for Actors. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross developed the Five Stages of Grief decades ago. According to Wikipedia, they are defined as:

Denial: “This is not happening to me.”
Anger: “How dare you do this to me?!”
Bargaining: “Just let me live to see my son graduate.”
Depression: “I can’t bear to face going through this, putting my family through this.”
Acceptance: “I’m ready, I don’t want to struggle anymore.”

While these events don’t all have to happen for every grieving person, nor do they have to happen in this order, Kübler-Ross claimed that a grieving person would always experience at least two.

So, since actors need to sometimes grieve for the roles they did not win, my actor friends and I came up with a system (flawed and humorous as it may be) for getting through the “I didn’t get the part” mourning period as quickly as possible.

Five Stages of Grief for Actors Who Didn’t Book

Deny-All: Not only is this a really bad idea for improv (remember, the “Yes, and…” is your best friend), it’s also bad for the grieving actor. “It isn’t my fault that I was late. I couldn’t help but be unprepared. I only got the sides yesterday. Traffic sucked. You don’t have any decent parking here. My headshots are still at the printer. Didn’t my agent send my photo over?” Then, when you don’t hear one way or the other about the role, you obsessively call your agent, “Did I get the part? Did I get the part? Did I get the part?” (Not only do these calls keep your agent from, oh, I don’t know, WORKING for you on other pitches, they also seem to happen because you forget that your agent would, of course, have called you to let you know if you had been cast. “Oh, sure. You got the part. I just decided not to call you and tell you. Y’know… for fun.”) So, back to your deny-all: “I didn’t get cast? Oh, well that’s totally not my fault. The CD hates me. I don’t know why she even calls me in if she doesn’t LIKE me. In fact, I’m so sick of her crap that actually, I was never even there for this one. I didn’t even audition. Honestly, I decided to pass on this project because I have too many other cool things brewing. So, that’s why I didn’t get cast. I no-showed.”

Of course, after the bravado of the Deny-All comes the seriously frightening spiral of the Angst-er.

Angst-er: This is the Actor Mind Taffy center of the actor’s grieving process. “What are they saying about me after my audition? What did they tell my agent about my read? Did they like my headshot? Was my resumé formatted correctly? Do they hate color photos? Did I use the wrong font? Did I pronounce that weird word right? Are they still talking about me at secret casting director parties weeks after my audition? Omigod, are they DOING impressions of me for each other? Man, if ONLY they could’ve seen the audition I did in my car later! I rocked!” And here’s where you call your agent again: “Could you get them to let me go back in and do one more audition? I really nailed this scene in class and I just know I could blow them away if they saw it again. They haven’t finished casting, have they? So maybe there is a way I could get back in there!” Yeah, agents love that. When you can’t get back in the room, you starting thinking: “Maybe they’re conspiring against me. Am I on a list somewhere that says I will never be seen? Have I been blacklisted and I just don’t know it? Oh no! What if I never work in this town again?”

Angst-er leads perfectly into Bar-Gain-ing. It’s really your only hope at this point.

Bar-Gain-ing: Go to the bar (Residuals is a good choice, since you can see thousands of small-change residual checks posted all over the walls and further beat yourself up over having never earned a residual check for anything ever); gain lots of drinks; and finally transition into the “screw ’em” zone. “Screw ’em! I AM funny and interesting! I am SO the right actor for the role. They just don’t know what they’re missing. They’ll be sorry. They’ll come begging for me on the next one and I’ll show them. I’ll say NO!” Then you fall off your barstool and laugh. Or cry. Try to laugh. The crying is actually pretty sad, at this point.

Here you come to a fork in the road, where there are two different grieving actor paths: Deep-Resting and Deep-PR-Obsession. Actors will do one of these two things, rarely both.

Deep-Resting: It’s time for Hiatus Hibernation. You crawl into a hole, bring all of your favorite Ben & Jerry’s and tabloid magazines, gain 15 pounds, and refuse to emerge until next pilot season.

Deep-PR-Obsession: Over self-promote. Send postcards to everyone in Hollywood for no good reason, attend every CD Workshop (and Seedy Workshop) you can find in case that magic person who can discover you and give you all of the secrets to Hollywood Success is just waiting to meet you and finally share the keys to the kingdom with YOU and only you. If you do enough, you figure, you’ll get past this grieving period and come out of it famous, t’boot!

Either way, eventually, you come around to Act-‘ceptance.

Act-‘ceptance: You finally see the project for which you auditioned. You see the person to whom you “lost the role.” It’s not your doppelganger. It’s not your ex-best-friend. It’s not the actor who signed with the agent you so so so wanted. It’s not your twin or that creep from acting class who always tries to mess up your game. It’s someone totally different than your type, ten years older or younger than you are, and perhaps even of the opposite sex. “Oh, duh! Of COURSE they weren’t going to cast me. They went another way!” you scoff, and off you go, to audition another day.

Now that you know the Five Stages of Actor Grief, you can (hopefully) hasten the period of time you spend in each, when you catch yourself spiraling toward Actor Funk. Remember, no one likes a bitter actor! So, get out of your own way, have fun, and break another leg.

Bonnie Gillespie is living her dreams by helping others figure out how to live theirs. Wanna work with Bon? Start here. Thanks!

Originally published by Actors Access at http://more.showfax.com/columns/avoice/archives/000405.html. Please support the many wonderful resources provided by the Breakdown Services family. This posting is the author’s personal archive.