Wait here. I have gone to get help.

I’m not a parent, first off, so this will all be speculation, but, I can imagine that as a parent, you only want what’s best for your child. You want them to have it easy. Not to have to struggle. Not have to claw, tooth and nail, scrounging for every inch of progress, only to have it ripped away at a moments notice, and have to start all over again, nay, I think that would be the last thing a parent would want for their child. Which is why its probably a real bummer when your precious little angel wants to become an actor.

Now, I believe that I have two of the most supportive parents an actor could ask for, short of being one of those stage parents that overindulge their star children to the point of raising them directly into the Betty Ford clinic. My lovely parents spent hours sitting through acting lessons, being scene partners, perfecting audition monologues over and over again, not to mention the hours sitting through performances that at least initially, were almost certainly not very good. My parents even encouraged me to follow my dream of acting when my own resolve failed and my fear of being poor threatened to keep me from even trying to succeed.

But even my near saintly, uber supportive mom and dad, have their limits.

After seeing their little girl turn to selling blood when times are lean, accepting many Craigslist offers that were less than savory, sometimes quite literally going hungry, and seeing it happen once or twice a year, year after year, and what with the successes being such a precious few and far between, its not hard to see how even the most invested parents on the planet might waiver in resolve. Now, I don’t mean to imply that my folks no longer support my dream, because they absolutely do. I merely wish to express that the plight of the thespian parent is not lost on me.

So if I may offer a word of advice to those parents of actors out there, it would be merely this: know that if we could be happy doing something else, we would. Know that when times are hard, and our doubts get so bad, we feel like we might literally be drowning, your unwaivering support, and believe me, I know what not waivering is costing you, your support may be the only thing that keeps us going when the situation seems especially dire. We know that its hard for you see us struggle, but if you can bear with us through the struggle, while we can’t promise it will pay off, we can promise it will mean the world to us.

And to the actors with uber supportive parents, if your parents look at you with big hopeful eyes and ask you if you have any auditions or big gigs coming up, look deep into their eyes, and lie.

Inevitably, in pop culture portrayals of acting, you will see a hard ass director interrupting a scene screaming passionately, “No! No! No! Stahp ACTEENG! Just BEEEE ze character!” usually with some eastern european accent. Well, Hard ass director guy’s words aren’t hard to understand (accent notwithstanding) in that you know what the words mean. But what do they mean? Lots of actors don’t even know what they mean and they’re actors for crying out loud. Lucky for them, when I started out acting on screen, I was terrible.

I had been stage acting my whole life. Big faces. Big voices. Have to reach the back of the house. Larger than life. On screen acting is a different beast entirely. The camera is inches from your face. A face which will be 50 feet high. Subtlety. Nuance. Less is more is now the key.

Brand-new-to-screen-acting Reagan was aware of beats, and how moments should land, and composed her face and voice appropriately. Nailed every switch from tactic to tactic, and change of emotion, and, it. was. Garbage. Capital G. Like truly over the top, no believability, rubbish. It didn’t feel real, it didn’t even look real! It was just fake, fakeness, fakery, because it was all Acting. Capital A. I was so busy rearranging my face to look like I was listening that I couldn’t listen. So busy appearing angry that I couldn’t be angry. I couldn’t be in the moment. I was a prerecorded performance being played on live TV and now the lines don’t match at all.

Being in the moment,  being open to it, was hard for me. And I had to figure it out piece by painstaking piece. First, stop worrying about my damn face. Second, listen to the other person. And the trickiest part, Respond.

I was in a short film early on in my career. It had a loose outline of events, and an even looser script. The actors were essentially free to do whatever. I was in a scene at a grocery store with the actor playing my boyfriend, whom I had zero chemistry with. We were walking around ACTING (uh-oh) like we were doing cute things while shopping, and wouldn’t you know it, Mr. No chemistry does an actual cute thing. And I was actually touched. And I felt the most natural thing to do in that moment was to kiss him, and further the connection we both felt. So, it’s a good thing that I did not do that at all (apply sarcastic font here) and instead I felt the impulse and I resisted. Doubted it. Was a little afraid of its suddenness. And watched it die, only to be replaced by some terrible, contrived shadow of the original authenticity.

That moment has haunted me since. It has served as a reminder over the years not to deny a single impulse that occurs to me to try. Good or bad. Because while some will be good, and some will still be rubbish, they’ll at least all be real. And I won’t have to live with the echoes of those missed moments living in my head like the voice of the kid from the sand lot reminding me that they’ll be gone forever…for-ev-ver…for-ev-ver…

Human beings are messy. And I don’t mean physically, or you know, just physically. Human beings are complicated webs of emotions and motives that can be hard to unravel even if you pull only one thread at a time. We are so complicated that quite often, even we don’t know what we are feeling or why we are doing a particular thing at a particular time.

As an actor, you must create this mess artificially. You must dismantle a character down to, or more accurately, assemble a character from all of the cloudy emotions, and half forgotten memories, and long held grudges that we as everyday humans hardly realize we’re carrying with us, and that can be a daunting task, and most unfortunately, one that if not done well, can be the undoing of a particular performance or piece.

I heard Jim Carrey speaking once about how he tackles such a task, and he suggested starting with a character’s secretly held beliefs about themselves. I’m paraphrasing here, and if you’d like to watch Ace Ventura himself speak about, watch his Inside the Actor’s Studio, but the gist and what truly inspired me about the approach was to break down a character, a person, to the basest, most deeply held beliefs about themselves. Ones even they may not know they have, and build your foundation on that.

Build your foundation on the broken, warped beliefs that all humans hold about themselves, that influence every decision we make, that affect every relationship in our lives. Start there and see what types of characters are born of those struggles.

A person going through a break up will be sad, yes. And miss their partner, absolutely. But its such a more fascinating struggle is they are also suffering under the lifelong delusion that no one will ever stay with them because their father left as a child. Someone who is losing their parent, may believe in their mind, that they have never achieved their parent’s pride and affection and now, they never will. Children say things to other children that have terrible consequences on the adults they become, and so on and so forth. The beliefs  we hold within ourselves, these hidden truths, color an otherwise static performance with richness and depth that resonate with audiences who hold these same misguided beliefs about themselves.

Lucky you, the actor, get to find these gems in the characters backstory, create them out of your imagination, to unearth all of the brutal, hidden, devastating secrets from the very bowels of these characters. Discerning meaning from seemingly harmless clues, because although Freud said, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar…sometimes it ain’t no cigar at all…

When I tell people I’m an actor, often their response will be, “What kind?” To which I must always respond, “What do you mean?” because to me, there IS only one kind. They reply  with something like, “You know” (an unfair assumption at that point) “Comedy or Drama?”

Why the civilian (read non-actor) assumes this is different types of acting is sort of understandable. It does look different to the naked eye, but I would argue that these are both the same types of acting. Are there differences in approaches to achieving the finished product? Absolutely. But just because angel food cake and cheesecake are made entirely differently, it doesn’t mean they both aren’t still cake.

The reason that comedy and drama, or tragedy if you will, are in essence the same is because they are both rooted in the same thing: Truth. Without truth, neither a comedic or dramatic performance will feel genuine. Certainly, the scale of the performance may be different. Think the Farrelly Brothers’ Dumb and Dumber compared to Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive. Drive is entirely about subtlety and nuance in performance, and Dumb and Dumber is farsical and ridiculous in nature. The two films, and their approaches to acting on the surface could not be more different. BUT. Just as Ryan Gosling must be as truthful with regards to his feelings about Carey Mulligan, so too must Jim Carey be truly hurt that his best friend has been attempting to woo his beloved regardless of the fact that the film is strictly a comedy. All of the actors must find where there is an overlap of truth between themselves and their characters and pursue it for all it’s worth, because without it, Drive is just a movie about two people staring at each other, and Dumb and Dumber is just a movie about two absurdly obnoxious people returning a suitcase.

There is a cautionary tale that they tell new, young actors before getting into the industry to give them an idea of the reality of the situation they face by choosing this career path, and it is that there are only 500 working actors making a living by acting at any given time. I don’t know how accurate this is but it does help instill a sense of gravitas about the choice you’ve made to become an actor.

But why? Why is that number so low? Why don’t more actors make it? Certainly, there are a lot of people competing for few jobs and that definitely plays into it, but I would argue that that is not actually why there are so few people able to make a living at being an actor. In reality, There is a far more insidious destructor of careers.

Imagine if you will, that you have one goal. To open a door. You stand at one end of a hallway, the door is at the other. Really all you need to do is walk through it. How hard can it be? Now, imagine that before you can even take your first step, you need to spend hundreds of dollars on getting the tools you need to be able to walk through. Once you’ve done that, if you don’t know how to actually walk through you’ll have to spend hundreds more learning how. Now, you have the tools and the know-how, but suddenly hundreds of people are there trying to go through the same door, and now there is someone who is hand picking people by some set of criteria you are unaware of. You can barely see the damn door now, but you are prepared to wait for your shot at walking through.

Now imagine, that after standing there for twelve hours or so, someone announces that door is closed for the day. But you are welcome to try again tomorrow. Do you go back? Let’s say you do. Many times. Days and days on end, and nothing changes. You are no closer to that door, in fact, it feels like the hallway is getting longer and you are further from the door than when you first tried. How long would you have the mental and emotional endurance to continue going back? How long before you stop even hoping the door will open? And how long after the hope is gone do you continue to try?

That is why there are only 500 working actors. Because the rest give up. Because the rest no longer have it in them to believe it will work, and they self destruct from the inside. Deciding to be an actor, truly be an actor and make a living at it, is to decide to be poor. It is to decide to be under constant financial strain. It is to decide to sacrifice relationship after relationship to the long hours, crushing pressure, and never ending panic that you are not doing enough, that you may never be able to do enough, and that even with doing enough, you may still never make it. It is to live with no stability in your life for the forseeable future.

It is deciding, that all of those things are something you are willing to live with indefinitely, that there is no fall back plan, and that until you can count your name among the 500, you will continue to stand in that hallway, no matter what. And it is a decision you will have to make over and over and over again.
So, no pressure or anything.

There are lots of ways to connect to a character. Some actors do it externally. They find a prop or costume piece that they identify with the character they’re portraying and wearing it or using it puts them in the headspace of that character. Some actors do it internally. They’ll create a particular mantra or belief that the character holds and repeating it, focusing on it allows them to hone in on the person they are creating. They are lots of ways it can be done, and none of them are wrong. But what about the times when you are unable to connect to the character in the usual ways you’re used to. The prop you’ve selected to use just doesn’t connect you in the way you’d like. When the walk you’ve created or the mantra you’ve come up with isn’t doing the job.

I find when I am at a loss, what grounds me is a physical behavior of a character in the scene. Indeed, if I’m really lost, I’ll just pick a movement, without even knowing what the end game is. I find this technique particularly helpful in rehearsals, where you are more freely able to try things and risk more, truly the actors at play.

One such scene occurred when I was in the Second City Training Center. We had been given a suggestion, Puppets, and I had no friggin clue what to do. I walked out to the stage and did the first thing I could think of to do which was to get down very low, and ask my scene partner, “Hey, could you help me move this?” What were we moving? No idea. Just needed something, anything to begin to create a character, a life, a scene.

This thing about picking a movement is that even without any backstory at all, it does something. My scene partner, though I had only given her a simple movement and asked her a question, could see it, use it and be inspired. She began to help me move “it”, and then was able to even to tell me what it was, and why we were moving it. Turns out it was a couch. And we were moving it because I was staging puppet practice in our living room. We began to engineer a scene about my character’s commitment to puppetry, and how it was disrupting our lives, which led to a dramatic confrontation, or at least it would have been except I was asked by the instructor to get my muppet out of the closet and mediate a heart to heart between my roommate and my puppet companion. It remains to this day one of my favorite acting moments. Her pleading and arguing with my unsheathed hand, which listened to her complaints responded back in a silly voice. It was very funny. It was unpredictable. And it was organic.

And it all came from a hail mary play of a choosing simple physical action: merely picking something up.
Find what grounds you, whatever it may be, and use the hell out of it, and if you are ever in a place, where you are lost and without a paddle, when in doubt, decide on a movement, something, anything, that you can physically do, and it will carry you into the rest.

I didn’t used to be afraid of the dark. I think I was fine as a young child being in my room in the dark alone. I don’t remember asking my parents to check the bed for monsters or anything like that. That was before. Before a little film called “Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight”. I was ten years old, and while it wasn’t strictly speaking actually that scary of a film, I was as I said, TEN, and at ten, the demon’s in the film were rather creepy. And after I saw that film (which by the way, I highly recommend as it’s a very fun campy horror, with a particularly fabulous performance from Billy Zane) I all of a sudden had developed a rather strong, somewhat debilitating fear of the dark, or at least of the things that might be in the dark.

I had a hard time going up the stairs to my room at night. I would crawl into bed with my parents, or ask my mom to sleep with me in my room, or at least stay with me until I fell asleep. And while I can’t remember how long this went on, I do remember it lasting a while.

For some reason, and to this day I don’t know what possessed me to do it, I decided I didn’t like being beholden to this fear, and I decided to do something about it. What my ten year old self decided to do was go inside my parent’s closet which was virtually light tight, and sit with the door closed in the dark. Scared shitless.

I have often thought back to this experience and wondered what on earth possessed a little girl to put herself through a rigorous decommissioning, especially one that was so uncomfortable. And to this day I don’t know what made me do it. But do it I did. I sat in that dark closet huddled up around my knees, shaking with fear. I did it over and over again. Did it until I stopped shaking, Did it until I no longer huddled. Did it until I was no longer afraid.

Human beings tend not to want to do things like this. We don’t like to be afraid. We don’t like to be uncomfortable. And actors, being human beings, are no exception. We also don’t like being uncomfortable. We also don’t like being afraid, BUT as actors, we are at our best when we are out of our element. At our best when we are uncomfortable to pursue a course of action. In fact, chances are, if we are faced with two character choices, the better course to choose will almost always be the one that makes us the least comfortable, the most uneasy.

Next time you are faced with a choice, on screen or off as a matter of fact, with one choice that seems familiar, safer, and one that feels foreign, scarier, I sincerely urge you, to choose the riskier option. It may not always be soundest choice, but it will yield the best results, the most growth, and ultimately what you will gain from it will undoubtedly serve you better.
But, seriously, that Billy Zane though….

I was a very hairy child. I got hair on my legs and arms faster than all my male counterparts, and I was teased about it mercilessly. As a result, I did everything in my power as soon as I was old enough, to bleach, shave, and wax my hairiness away. And I was uncomfortable about the steps I had to take to look like everyone else, so I hid my grooming habits until I was about 23. Around that time, I sort of, just stopped caring about it. Why bother hiding something that was out of my control? I began to say, Yeah, I bleach my mustache, daring them to criticize me this time. I didn’t ask for the ethnic background that caused thick, luxurious hair to grow all over my body. I was done worrying about it. This is who I am. That was the first step. It was like that with crying. (Wait for it, there’s a point coming.)

I used to hide when I cried. Until I was like, 25. Why? Not sure really. Just did. Maybe I didn’t want to bother people with it. Maybe I felt like I was being weak. Hiding my emotions, maintaining a brave face, was normal for me. Sort of like, being hairy.

Now I’m going to backtrack one second. I’ve always had a hard time crying on camera. As you might imagine, if it wasn’t easy for me to cry in front of friends and family, it was even more difficult to cry in front of strangers, much less on cue. In order to cry on camera, I would try all kinds of approaches: opening up deep, personal wounds, immersing myself in the character before each take, sad stories I had heard on the news, dead puppies, that sort of thing, but it never worked. It never came when I needed it.

The time came, however, that I realized that crying, more importantly, being vulnerable to fellow humans, was not going to be a source of ridicule. That it wasn’t me being weak. Then IT happened.

I was guesting in a university final, volunteering my time and skills for young directors to practice on. We were performing a scene in which a divorcing couple are dividing their things, and there over a picture frame, I started to get emotional. I hadn’t been trying to but I was definitely fighting back tears, as the character would have done. Take after take the tears were getting stronger and more difficult to hold back, but they were there. And rather than shying away from it or rather running, screaming for the hills, I let it happen. The emotion continued to build, but this time, I could control it. It came when I called. Was there when I needed it.

It wasn’t until much later that I realized the difference. Because I had finally learned to be vulnerable off camera, to let myself be affected, possibly hurt by another person, it allowed me to be open to it on camera. Freed me from having to force it, or trick myself into doing it. I could just feel, and respond.

Now, I will tell you that crying on camera is not all it’s cracked up to be. In a lot of ways, it’s a party trick. But being vulnerable is not a party trick. Being vulnerable is all there is. Allowing yourself to truly be affected by another human being is life. And it most certainly is acting.

So, if you bleach your mustache, it’s time to start fessing up. Your acting career will thank you.

People say, Oh well, you’re an actor, how can I believe you? You can trust everything I say because it is instantly obvious when I’m not only lying but even just hiding the truth. Why? Because I am transparent. You could say that I have a bad poker face. You don’t want to tell me a hilarious secret, it won’t go well for you. Many a surprise party has been ruined by me- Well, you get the idea.

My point in all this is that, I am a good (if I do say so myself) actor precisely because I’m a bad liar.

Stay with me on this.

To be a good liar, you must be accurately able to conceal your true motives, or thoughts, or feelings to give the illusion that in fact, you are thinking or feeling something other than what you are actually thinking or feeling. That’s how the whole lying thing works.

To be a good actor, you must be able to reveal your true motives, or thoughts or feelings, to give the illusion that in fact, your character is thinking or feeling something other than what you, the actor, is actually thinking or feeling. That’s how the whole acting thing works.

I’m not going to lie to you (because I can’t. Ha Ha Get it?). It can be sort of a pain to wear your emotions on your sleeve in real life. You will inadvertently ruin the super secret endings to movies for your friends if you’ve seen them and they haven’t, Whatever romantic partner you have will almost certainly know when you are upset whether you want them to or not, and if you are flirting with the cute bartender, everyone will know.

But there are upsides. If you’re not flirting with the cute bartender, everyone knows that too, when you say to your partner they have the handsomest face in the whole world they can at least believe that you believe it, and when you step in front of the camera and tell your cheating husband that he broke your heart, they’ll believe that too. Because it will read true, down to the bone.

So…I guess I’ve got that going for me.

A carpenter has hammers, nails, saws and the like. A surgeon has forceps, scalpels, and gauze. But, I ask you, what are an actor’s tools?

The usual answers are the voice, or the body, perhaps an inventive pragmatist might suggest the actor’s training is a tool, but I would argue that the strongest tool in the actor’s wheelhouse is the breadth of their experience. The small comfort in an actor’s life is that whatever horrible and soul crushing experiences we may be going through in our day to day reality, we know we gain one more color in the emotional palette we have to choose from.

Case in point, I have had, in my life, the most unfortunate task of ending a long relationship. I say unfortunate. What I meant was horrendous, miserable, heart breaking task of thoroughly and deeply wounding someone I cared very much for. In my mind, I can still relive those moments and feel those emotions. Feel so sick to my stomach that I couldn’t eat. Feel so utterly anguished that tears become in and of themselves an emotion, felt unending for days at a time. I have never experienced that before, and would not wish upon my worst enemy.

Yet somehow, in the small part of my brain desperately struggling to find reason and normality in my life, I knew that although this had affected me personally, the actor I was had changed. It was like discovering a new color. Learning how much one can go through and decide to keep breathing has a value outside of personal growth. I had become someone capable of understanding what has to be one of the worst feelings on the planet, that is to say, being the cause of someone you love’s suffering, and not being able to do a damn thing to fix or change it. That burning and soulful gray is something I can never un-know.

Not all colors in the palette are heart wrenching. Having been able to experience moments of such powerful love and desire that it feels like the earth moved without me, allows me to know that deep, purple passion and use it to craft new earth-moving loves on screen.

The downside to all of this, however, is that new paints and brushes (I’m sticking with the painting analogy. It works for me) come with experience. Without the experiences behind them, though an actor can be as truthful as they are capable of, the colors won’t run as true, won’t have the depth to them required to portray what needs to be portrayed. Not with any real credibility. It is hard to portray a mother’s love, without actually being a parent. Hard to convey a truly tragic loss of a loved one, if you’ve never lost someone close to you.

So, creative types that are reading this article, live your lives. Love with your whole heart. Take big scary risks that may indeed go horribly wrong. Celebrate the losses as much as the victories because both allow you to create more genuinely, affect more deeply, and paint a more vibrant picture than you would have ever been capable of creating before.