In June I wrote that I’d gone back to oil and gas, that I’d already turned down two auditions, and that my agent had told me there was a limit. If I turned down too many he’d put me on hold until my schedule opened back up. He said he didn’t want to part ways and that the hold would just be the fallback.
That was three months ago. I’ve turned down four or five now and I’ve done exactly one audition since I started back. Neither my agent nor my manager has dropped me.
I thought the auditions were what I was giving up. Almost every one I turned down was a commercial and I don’t care about commercial auditions. The dates didn’t work anyway. I’m on four weeks on and two weeks off and the window where I can take work is small, so nearly everything that came my way had shoot dates outside it and I said no.
At first that bothered me. It doesn’t now. Since going back offshore I’ve been cast in project after project by people I already know, without auditioning, and I’m booked through the end of 2027. I wrote in July about how that started and it goes back to a bad shoot in a park in 2023 and a message from a DP who liked working with me.
I think that’s why my manager has kept me. She can see how much I’m booking on my own. I made myself almost completely unavailable and I’m still working more than I did when I was home full time.
They both have my schedule and they know how narrow it is. I told them to keep pitching me for big roles anyway, and that if something real came in I’d audition and figure out the logistics if I booked it. Nothing big has come through since, so I don’t know yet what that looks like.
My coworkers are the ones who’ve made this work. They’ll come back from their own time off early if I need it, or let me extend mine. Last trip home one of them extended his time off to three weeks and another extended his stay offshore so I could take my two weeks when I needed them. My boss knows I have a lead role in a month-long shoot toward the end of next year and we’ll plan around it. I didn’t expect that from an oil and gas crew.
I shot my own short at the end of August, which was easy because I scheduled it around my rotation. Everything else has had to bend to fit and so far it has. My next two projects both land in this rotation off. One is a new series called The Missing where I play a detective. The other is Having Fun.
Four or five declined auditions isn’t a lot and they were commercials I didn’t want, so I haven’t had to say no to something I actually wanted yet. I don’t know how that will go. And none of this works without the three years I spent going to networking events, being easy to work with on set and staying out of the drama.
If you’re an actor with a day job wondering whether taking the money means giving up on acting, this is where I’ve landed. The job pays for my own films and the people I’ve worked with are the ones putting me in things. The auditions I’m missing haven’t cost me much.
