It's More Than Just Playing Pretend

Dozens of unforgettable memories flood my mind as I revisit the smell of old lockers and view the colourful school-spirit mural that welcomes its guests to Bayridge Secondary School. I didn’t attend Bayridge on the outskirts of my old home Kingston, Ontario, but it appears like any other high school. Students want out and teachers want peace until they too can leave. I, on the other hand, have dared to do the opposite and have come back to the one environment I never thought I would visit again. 

I am here to meet an old friend, teacher and fellow actor. I am nervous from not having seen him in so long, and excited, as he is one of the few performing artists who has actually taught me anything about the real world of acting. From my few years of both community and professional acting most of what I've learned towards my acting style I have mostly attained from this one man.

I first met Mike Bullett during my last year of high school. A teacher of a focus program called Theatre Complete; he surrounded me and almost twenty others with the facts and emotions of theatre for our entire first semester. He has been my most influential guide on the path to the passion and reality of becoming a professional performer. Mike has worked in the business for more than 30 years, not just as an actor but also as a director, writer and producer. He loves to do comedy, even when teaching, but has no problem making an audience shed tears. More importantly, he has never had his autograph asked for, his face isn’t up on millions of billboards and his name isn’t shining from the portals of hundreds of lights. He is what being an actor is all about, showing every day that a career of creation and entertainment can be both rewarding and striving.

Today though, Mike is in his usual worn out jeans and roomy black dress shirt, and comes to find me sitting hesitantly at Bayridge’s main office, wishing that the clean-cut and orderly atmosphere didn’t have me remembering the more testing times of my teenage-hood. Those thoughts begin to disappear when Mike gives me one of his accepting grins as we enter his history classroom, filled with the typical posters of historical moments and uneven rows of desks. We are finally able to begin discussing the real reason to why I am here.  

After talking about what’s been happening in our lives since we last saw each other, almost a year ago, Mike seems more open to talk about his life as an actor. Admitting that he feels like he has never really had to give up anything extreme for his career, there have been times where he has had to deal with the large egos that always seem to creep up in fellow performers.  “I find that many actors who don’t have confidence instead feel insecure and therefore feel like they have to brag about their whole resume,” he tells me and I immediately nod. From only five years of professional acting experience I probably know almost a hundred different acting resumes. It may make an actor feel better but all I feel is the immediate need to go deaf.

“The good actors have the natural confidence and don’t have to build themselves up,” Mike concludes. Still, being one of those good actors is not easy. It’s difficult to keep that confidence when, according to Miriam Newhouse and Peter Messaline in their third edition of The Actor’s Survival Kit (yes, it’s like we’re going off to war here people), an actor will only get a part once out of every ten auditions and that’s if they regularly audition on a weekly basis. An actor’s confidence can easily dwindle when, for the umpteenth time this month, he or she is being told that they are simply too “plump” for a part. Not that I’ve ever had that happen to me, of course.

Giving birth to the act of a life

Even though a performer’s confidence is never concrete, the really good actors can look beyond their egos and see the real work that lies ahead: creating the most realistic character possible. When I say "real" I don’t mean when a director looks at a performer and says “On that specific line cry,” or at least that’s how Mike puts it. An actor may not physically cry, but they will be engulfed by that character’s emotion so much that no amount of tears could ever justify a more intense feeling of sadness.

However, Mike is soon to stop me from discussing the emotion of creating characters when he recites a phrase better known to me than any cliché. “The bane of my existence is 'LEARN YOUR LINES!'” Having been in the acting game for as long as Mike has this phrase has gradually become extinct, or at least more tolerable. Yet, as a young actress, soon to be in her early twenties, I can’t tell you how often I walk into a rehearsal, three months before show time, and I still see cheap portfolio bindings of scripts being held in the hands of an actor trying to improvise his lines, even with Shakespeare's material.

Once those lines are learned there is also the immediate question that all actors have to ask themselves before creating a character. How far do actors go before they aren’t really acting anymore? To better explain this to me Mike brings up a discussion held between Dustin Hoffman and Laurence Olivier during their work on the film Marathon Man. In order to get into character Hoffman admits he actually made himself stay awake for two days so he could experience the same fatigue that the character would feel. After which Olivier, being one of the greatest actors of the 20^th century, quickly remarks, “Why don’t you try acting, dear boy?”

I later found from Roger Lewis’s biography of the late actor that this actually helped to bond Hoffman and Olivier, as they both realized the issue of acting vs. experiencing that they had embarked. Mike realizes it too, “That’s cheating to me…Where is the acting coming in? It is about getting the emotion of the character but physically harming yourself shouldn’t be an option…That’s where both the actor’s ability to act and the audiences’ imagination have to come into play.”

A lifestyle choice

Besides performing, I step more into discussing an actor’s lifestyle, and question Mike about starting a professional acting career when he was my age. He immediately shakes his head, “When I finished my degree it was never a choice between professional acting and teaching. I wanted to teach. I knew I wanted a family and I knew I would need to support them.”

This is always the top issue for any artist wanting to go into an unreliable profession. It was with me, when only just last year I had to decide what career path I wanted to take. At first, I tried to see if there was any way to make a life for myself as a professional performer and I dug as far as the Screen Actors Guild (SAG). There are over 100,000 members of the SAG union, and in their mission statement illustrate how they represent actors through “the preservation and expansion of work opportunities”. After reading this, I even thought about applying to be a member. Mike looks at me and grins; he knows I found something that will come as no surprise.

It took me almost a month of Googling and Wikipedia frenzy until I discovered a SAG document fully detailing how an actor can receive government benefits while being out of work without breaking California State Law. Even SAG knows that a good portion of their members can’t find work, but what I want to know is why this document is so hard to find? If I can’t even trust a union like this to represent me then making acting a full-time career option definitely isn’t in the cards. So, what do I choose instead? To be a writer, because that couldn't be an unstable job choice. Ha!

At the end of the interview I realize that Mike has taught me even more about my choices in life, as he always does; the instinct to teach never seems to escape him. As we’re saying our goodbyes, and I’m trying not to feel as if I’m losing a good friend and leader in my life, we both stumble upon a rehearsal in the halls of Bayridge for its most recent high school production of Blood Ties. A thriller filled with abstract mystery and suspense, the student actors convey the story of a young woman tortured in discovering the truth behind the murder of her parents, until she realizes her all-to-literal killer instinct. Although the few students are rehearsing such horrific parts of human nature, their creative energies flow through the hallway, alongside their booming voices.

I smile as Mike tells me that the production is soon to go up (but I still see scripts in hands) and for the first time during this whole experience I find the one memory I enjoy: the beginning years of performing. Your confidence may be slim, you may fumble through a few lines and your parents may be paying for the gas to come pick you up from another late night at school, but that’s okay because for a few moments you are able to capture and express someone completely different from yourself. As I walk out of that all too familiar atmosphere I'm not just pleading for those days back but I wonder if I've made the right choice after all.