What can I do for myself as an actor?

There's a lot of chatter on the socials about auditions picking up soon.

Whether or not that proves to be true, actors are always asking:

“What can I do for myself as an actor?”

Generally, this is followed by immediate despair and doom scrolling.

Or perhaps the actor finally updates their website—and then sinks into despair and doom scrolls.

So I brought this question to our recent Business of Acting Collective, and together we made an exhaustive list of things we actually can be doing for ourselves.

As we talked, I kept coming back to something a mentor said to me once:

“If you want something to get clean over there, polish over here.”

I've witnessed the strange beauty of this principle over and over again in my acting career and my life.

Early in my career, I was banging my head against the proverbial wall. I was taking all the right acting classes, working on my craft at home, doing the business work out in the world—and nothing was hitting.

Finally, I got fed up.

I dropped everything I'd been grinding away at and turned my attention to something that had nothing to do with acting: fixing up the shared garden in front of my building. It had essentially become a trash can.

For a month, I spent what little money I had on plants. I pulled weeds. I cleaned. I put my energy into making something beautiful that I could actually touch.

During the third week, I got an audition for Take Me Out at a regional theater.

I prepared the role while I finished the garden.

And you can probably guess what happened.

I booked it.

It was the contract that turned me Equity—and one of my favorite roles to date.

I've experienced some version of this too many times to dismiss it.

I put constructive energy into something within reach. I stop staring at the thing I can't control. And suddenly, something brand-spankin' new—sometimes something I didn't even know I wanted—appears in another corner of the room.

My take is that energy is nonlinear.

When we get busy creating, growing, building, or improving something, we send out a signal:

I'm an actor. I'm an artist. I'm here. I'm working.

And sometimes the world sends back opportunities we never could have planned ourselves.

If the opportunity is a direct result of the work you put in—bonus.

Over the next several days, I'll be sending a series of emails about what we can do for ourselves as actors, tackling a little at a time.

It'll help me as much as I hope it helps you.

I'll also post links to each email on my Threads account, @LucasJVE, in case you miss any.

For now:

If you want something to get clean over there, polish over here.

Lucas

Open Studio Acting, NYC
On-Camera Training • Self-Tape Coaching • Actor Development
NYC & Hudson Valley • Zoom Worldwide
IG: @openstudioacting