Why I started Acting, and How it has developed my character (the one I play every day).

In school we had a drama teacher who injured both his hands in a car accident. He came in to class one day with what looked like white mitten gloves on and his eyes were bloodshot red. He looked like hell and his already fierce temper was heightened due to his predicament. As a class we also were his worst behaved and I can imagine him looking at the schedule for his day, seeing exactly who he had to teach after what had happened, and letting out the most guttural of groans. I did not envy him at all, more so I feared the idiot who would provoke him.

‘You are to come up with a scene, alright, in groups of 6 and the idea is that 3 of you do the voiceovers and the other 3 say nothing but move and react to what is being said. Got it. I will give you the background and you perform it for us in 15 minutes’. These were our given instructions from him. It’s a great exercise for improvisation skills, truth be told I almost got a bit excited but then he puts me in a group with ‘the boys’ of the class, and I let out a groan that I knew was real. I honestly tried my best to speak up, even if none of them listened as they didn’t like me very much and we did the scene. At the end however, the teacher replies…

‘That’s it? 15 minutes and that’s it! Right, switch roles, you three talk and you three don’t. I expect a bit of enthusiasm so I don’t feel as though I’m wasting my time’.

You’d think since I’m now selected to talk that ‘the boys’ would listen to what I had to say, but nope, there they were just rambling away about how much of an arse the teacher was. How they think it’s his fault for not helping them, even if he had walked around the class before this offering his critique that they had also ignored. All I knew was at this point I’m getting hungry, and I’m not staying behind during lunch to hear them moan about their lives. Fuck it. I’ve lost my patience for this. I’m saying what I want to and whatever they think is what they think. Worst case scenario is I mess up the scene, get a bollocking (telling off) from the teacher or ‘the boys’, and I don’t get picked to be on their team later. I didn’t want to be picked by them anyway!

What’s important here is this is the earliest moment I can remember with what I learned years later as the ‘policeman in the head’. The voice that tells you to ‘hold back, Stop! Don’t try it! Don’t speak up! You’ll fail! It’s too scary! What if you embarrass yourself?! Don’t do it!’ It was my first experience of telling that voice to take a break, because I’m doing it whether you like it or not. And I have remembered it for 11 years.

Regardless of what happened that day I did not get back into acting until I was 24 years old. I didn’t get a qualification in drama or theatre, I didn’t study it and had no interest in pursuing it for a long time. I was mainly focused on getting out of school and university alive, and spending the rest of my time talking about all these great ideas me and my friends had over late nights writing songs with oven pizzas we always undercooked. Then maybe we’d go dancing in the murphy’s nightclub until 3am on Saturdays, and I’d think of finding ways to become a more confident man. Acting just wasn’t on the radar, but it was when I was a child. Looking back to that time, when acting was on my mind and before I went to the secondary school (High School) that had ‘the boys’, there were no limits to both my imagination and my confidence.

I used to give one person shows for my family in my grandmother’s kitchen, grabbing shoots out of her kitchen plant while dancing to ‘Me Ol’Bamboo’ like Dick Van Dyke. I used to get cast in every school play, where I wasn’t just ‘Shepard Number 4’ or the front end of a Horse, no I had speaking roles! and the roles that meant I had to speak the loudest. I felt like I had the world in the palm of my hand and that anything was possible. I could do anything, be anyone and I could make people laugh or smile and bring them something that could help them forget about their worries, for seemingly the rest of their days. I loved every second of my childhood and a lot of it came down to my love of performing.

This is where I wish someone had warned me about the harsh nature of your teens. It wasn’t wholly down to my misery with ‘the boys’, and I can’t really blame them because they were in their terrible teens too. It’s just that they took a different path than mine and didn’t understand why anyone was different to them. We all were in this mesh of anxiety, clambering for social stability and standing in a wild and untameable jungle, as well as it being a constant back and forth of positives and negatives as your hormones play with you like a Yo-Yo. My Mum did apparently tell me but it’s hard to listen to anything when you’re constantly moving up and down.

It’s because of this rollercoaster of emotions, the time in my life that was most turbulent and unsure, that I completely forgot about acting and missed out on its true benefits.

That all changed because of something else that I have a passion for, another creative passion that I developed but on my own and with nobody watching me, reading and writing.

Once I started to write again, because of a suggestion by a friend that had used it to express their innermost feelings, I got a bit addicted to it. I tasked myself with becoming a better writer and expressing myself better in what I’d write. I wanted to think up stories, fact or fiction, which had pieces of me in them that someone could use, which in any genre had a truth and an honesty in them. I had to do my research to achieve this, reading as much as I wrote to better understand how the most impactful, happy, sad, honest and humble of people had told their own truth in their stories. It led me to do a lot of thinking about life, maybe where I had gone wrong or what I had gotten right but the most important part of it was that it made me become honest, without any apologies to myself about what I wrote or what I told myself. It meant I found out, amongst a litany of things, just how much I wanted to act again. To act as if I knew what I was doing.

Actors are not just pretending on screen to get a pay check. That’s the biggest misconception I’ve had before jumping into acting classes. They’re being themselves but under a different name, a different motivation and a different set of circumstances. An actor chooses to audition for a role in a story, they aren’t told who to be, because they find something relatable in that character and choose them. I found that out first hand when I chose to play a particular character for the first time. It doesn’t always work out and maybe you aren’t cast, but if you are it’s because you wanted them.

When an actor, as an interesting example, plays a villain they’re usually the nicest person in press interviews and amongst their peers. The idea behind that I thought was because it’s easy to play the villain if you have seen so many try to fight against you, the ‘hero’. The nicest person then can play a villain because it’s closely linked to who they would become if the real villains in their life’s story had won and turned them ‘to the dark side’. It’s a reflection of yourself. It’s why many actors go full on into ‘method acting’ for their roles because they want to escape into that character for a better performance. I personally don’t think it’s always necessary but there is always something of themselves in a performance.

You discover things about yourself when you are acting and you heighten those discovered aspects of yourself when you play a character. Naturally this bleeds over into your normal life, where you no longer are pretending, because you’ve exposed parts of yourself already as someone else. You can’t take it back, it’s out there and because of this you can become much surer of your choices and your ideals, of who you are and where you are going, because they have helped you build characters. It helps to silence the voice that tells you to ‘stop or you’ll make a fool of yourself!’, because when you’re acting you can’t hold back, which makes you question why you would when the spotlight is off you. That then I suppose is why I, and many others, decide to act.

Also I got let out for lunch, didn’t get picked last but still wasn’t on ‘the boys’ of my class’ team and one of them bought me a can of orange soda for my efforts. Bridges weren’t mended that day, but it was a start.

https://www.instagram.com/dan.abides/ – Check out my most recent post on Instagram, @dan.abides , to follow my acting progress, as I’m about to have my first audition of the year!