I Was Paying a Career Tax on My Acting Career and I Didn't Even Know It

When I decided to relaunch my acting career at 47, I was an American living in Munich with no current show reel, no contacts, and honestly not even a clue how the industry even worked anymore. I'd already carved out a pretty good niche doing voiceover and presenting. It was fun, it was flexible, and the money was great. But it wasn't acting and it wasn't going to lead to acting. So I decided to figure out how to get closer to what I wanted in a way that also supported my dream instead of draining it.

Which meant I had to take a hard look at the whole survival job conversation for actors. And what I realized then is something that's really shaped how I think about this career ever since.

The survival job isn't just eating your time. It's eating a lot more than that.

The hours conversation misses what's actually happening

Everyone talks about the time a survival job eats out of an actor's career. The hours thing is the obvious thing. What's much more insidious are the things that aren't.

Like your energy. You come off a hard day's work and you're supposed to have enough creativity left over to prep a self-tape. To sit down in front of a camera and be brilliant. You just gave your best hours and your best creative energy to a job that doesn't know or care that you're an actor, and your career gets whatever's left over. It's hard to be fabulous in two places at once.

Like your identity. The number one thing actors say when I ask what they actually want is "I just want to work." Every time I hear that, I hear the heartbreak. Why can't I earn a living doing what I trained to do, what I love doing?

Because every time you tell someone you're an actor, you feel slightly like an imposter, because you're earning your living doing something else. We all think that's just how it goes, we're paying our dues. But the real problem is that pattern is slowly carving itself into your identity, one "so what do you do for money?" at a time. "Have you done anything I would know?" "Are you famous?" Each one of those questions tears a tiny piece of your soul away. Most of the time the person asking has no actual clue about the industry, and yet you still feel like you need to justify what you're doing.

And the biggest piece? Your network. We're the composite of the five people we spend the most time with. So do we just not count our coworkers?

Actors know this. That's why so many of us try to get creative about it. I know actors who target restaurants and bars frequented by industry people, so they can chat them up in between courses. I know actors who do a lot of extra work, which gets you on set but doesn't get you in the peer group. (Have you ever noticed extras have their own catering, their own hang-out areas, their own place on the call sheet? That tells you what the people above the line think about extras. It's harsh, but it's real.) And I know actors who go work as casting assistants thinking they're closer to the source, and they are closer. But guess what they end up doing for a living? Being a casting assistant. Proximity is not peer level.

So you're exhausted, your identity is slowly eroding, and you're spending your best hours surrounded by people who can't hire you and can't introduce you to anyone who can. That's not a survival job. In Germany we call that the devil's circle. I started calling it the career tax.

The tax is the symptom, not the problem

Here's the thing though. The survival job isn't actually the problem. It's the symptom.

The real problem is the gap between where you are and where you want to be. Maybe it's training. Maybe it's connections to the people who cast. Maybe it's that nobody in the industry even knows you exist. The survival job just fills the space where that gap lives. And until you figure out which gap is yours, you'll keep paying the tax.

What a support job looks like

When I relaunched, I knew I was rusty as hell and there was no training to be found in Munich. So I brought it. I found the coaches I wanted to learn from, organized the training I needed, and invited other actors who wanted the same thing. We all learned. I got paid too. After a year of doing that, I'd gotten over twelve thousand euros in free training and earned almost fifty thousand euros.

I didn't think about agents or casting directors until I'd solved the training problem. One thing at a time.

The money wasn't the point. The money was just the thing that gave me freedom. Freedom from worry, from drudgery, from someone else's schedule. That's what I mean by a support job. Something that fixes your gap while also paying you. Something that adds to your career instead of draining it.

Arriella and Meg and two versions of the same method

Arriella came to me knowing two things. Her dream is to someday have her own theater, and she needed to find a way to keep working on her craft where she lived. So her first step was creating an intensive scene study for advanced actors in her town. She brought in Dexter Bullard, an award-winning director who's directed for Steppenwolf, The Goodman, The Vic, Second City, and on Broadway, and she got him to fly from Chicago to Kingston, New York to help her and a small group of other actors get better at their craft. Her marketing was messy, she felt out of her depth the whole time, and she sold only five seats. It was not a home run.

But here's what also happened. She got her training for free. She made a real connection with Dexter, they had dinner, and he's already started telling his colleagues about what she's building. Some of those colleagues are now reaching out to her. She joined her city's Arts Commission. The community center where she hosted the workshop wants to become the permanent home of her future theater. And she's building a community of actors in a town where nothing like this existed before. There is no bad math here.

Then there's Meg. Meg is an Emmy-nominated showrunner and actor who moved to Sweden with her family five years ago. She'd been trying to pitch her show in Europe for just as long, and nobody was returning her emails. Five years. An Emmy nomination, and she couldn't get a single meeting. If an Emmy nomination doesn't open doors, what chance does "please keep me in mind" have?

She came to the Side Door Challenge, we built a plan, and she created an event that brought four decision makers into one room. Because she was the one curating the event, she got to have real conversations with them. One of those conversations led to an introduction to a studio that just green-lit the show she'd been pitching for the last five years. She's finally getting it made and she gets to star in it. Oh, and that event she put together? It also earned her $4,125 in eight hours.

My dream was to become a working actor again. Arriella's dream is to build a rep theater. Meg's dream is to star in her own show. All three of us had completely different dreams and completely different gaps, but the same method for figuring out where to start.

The Side Door Challenge

If you're sitting there realizing you've been paying this career tax, that's exactly what we work on inside the Side Door Challenge. It's a live five-day experience running May 4th through 8th where we figure out exactly what your gap is and then build a step-by-step plan specific to your career.

The full episode is on YouTube  Your Survival Job Is Killing Your Acting Career