I was recently catching up on some TiVoed episodes of one of my new favorite summer series, Saved. This critically-acclaimed TNT drama is basically what ER was in its first season: gritty, compelling, heart-wrenching, occasionally funny, and utterly addictive. It also happens to star one of my favorite actors, Tom Everett Scott. Last year, my writing partner Blake Robbins and I met with Tom for an interview in Acting Qs: Conversations with Working Actors. I’d always been a fan of Tom’s work, but having him over to my house last year caused me to have greater interest in his career’s twists and turns. (This tends to happen with most CDs, from what I’ve observed. Once we have a personal relationship with an actor, we’re even more excited to keep up with his or her path.) But I have to admit a certain level of swooning, schoolgirl crush-type interest in this particular case (much to my husband’s displeasure). I mean, c’mon. He’s just yummy.
That said, the reason I’m focusing on a portion of Tom’s career for this week’s column has everything to do with news that came down through the trades about his attachment to several series in early 2005. You see, shortly after our interview with Tom in February 2005, Tom was fired from one green-lit series after having shot the pilot (bad news), then attached within weeks to a pilot for another network (good news). And within weeks of that, his new pilot hadn’t been picked up and he was released from his deal (bad news). As I choked back tears during a particularly moving scene in Saved, I said, “I cannot wait for Tom to pick up his Golden Globe and Emmy next year. This is such a rockstar show.” And then I remembered back to early 2005 and how sad for Tom I felt at the time.
It’s really easy to get down about the “bad news” that comes along in your career. But if you knew that the “bad news” was actually providing you with the space in your life to bring in the really “good news” that you otherwise wouldn’t have been available to accept, you’d probably not get so blue about it at all. Of course, that philosophy is of the easier said than done variety.
A while back, I had signed on to a feature film for which I would have spent not quite a year casting. The budget was bigger than on any film I had cast up to that point and that meant good money for the actors, “star names” incentive pay, and a really healthy paycheck for me (especially this early on in my casting career). At some point in the early stages of casting prep work (creating the character breakdown, formulating the “name actor” lists, defining limits for perks and billing, and deciding on our flexibility with shoot dates should the right celebrity only be available for a limited range of time), the business relationship disintegrated. I had a choice: Enforce the terms of my contract or walk away from the gig, collecting a small kill fee as compensation for the work I’d done up to that point.
I chose to leave the project. I decided that my mental health was far more valuable than the money I would earn if I had continued on, per my contract. Since the option was mine, I chose the path that looked like bad news, trusting that there was good news ahead (perhaps a project for which I would not have been available, had I continued on with this film). It wasn’t until several months later that I did the math to discern what salary — exactly — I had walked away from. See, I’m not actually that interested in seeing what was behind Door Number Two. Y’know on the old game show Let’s Make a Deal, when a contestant would choose the box rather than the curtain? And Monty Hall would force the contestant to stand there and see what he could’ve had. Heck, I guess that’s what they do on Deal or No Deal now! Well, I’m just not overly curious about what “could’ve been.” I guess that’s odd, but it works for me. Regret and resentment are just forms of wasted energy. Still, eventually, I did take out my calculator and discover that I walked away from over $80,000. (For a kid who ate government-subsidized lunches in grade school, this is a pretty big deal, of course.) Did I kick myself at that point? No way. I just said, “Hmm. Now I know how much I value my happiness. It’s worth at least ten grand a month.”
My point: I think it is incredibly important to remember that there is some bad news that is really just good news deferred. Did Tom cry in his beer over the fact that he was let go from two network sitcoms in six weeks? Maybe. Did he let the fact that he very publicly lost two jobs keep him from continuing his pursuit of other work? Heck no! And when he saw the script for Saved, did he thank his lucky stars that he wasn’t on the set of some poorly-reviewed raunchy sitcom so that he could be considered for something far more personally meaningful and critically-acclaimed? You betcha. However, you simply cannot know, ahead of time, what bad news is providing you an opportunity for good news. And if you need to know that sort of thing, this business is not going to be a good fit for you. We hear a great deal about which famous actors turned down roles that made other actors household names and think, “Man! He has got to be mad that he missed that opportunity!” Sure, those stories are interesting, but to keep yourself in a healthy mindset, I recommend a shift in perspective: Think about the gigs that “got away” and perhaps saved you from creating the wrong kind of name for yourself, gave you the chance to accept something better, or caused you to appreciate the power of saying no. That kind of life lesson is invaluable.
I’ll close this week’s column with some words of wisdom from Tom Everett Scott himself, regarding his philosophy that you just have to keep putting yourself out there, even when nothing is happening in your career.
I had been auditioning for films but not yet really booking anything. I was auditioning daily, like two, three auditions a day. That’s really the best way to have a shot at it, is being out there all the time. So, that’s my advice: Go out and do that. Go out with your friends, rent a space, pick a play, pay the copyright, make posters, go out at midnight and put your posters up where you’re not supposed to put ’em, and then put on your show. Feel great! Talk to your friends afterward in the lobby and do all of the fun theatre things that come with it and then see what comes from there. We did a couple of established plays, but they were obscure. We didn’t want to do anything standard. We didn’t want to be a “cover band,” we always said. They weren’t always great plays, but we felt they were great because they were ours. We were supporting each other and this was our clubhouse.
I’d be willing to bet that this sort of mindset is what has kept him working (and, more importantly, kept him down-to-earth and happy) for so long. In a business that makes finding (and focusing on) the “bad news” so very easy, sometimes it’s the very simple choice to just keep working that can make all the difference. And that’s seriously good news.
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/000425.html. Please support the many wonderful resources provided by the Breakdown Services family. This posting is the author’s personal archive.