Don’t Act, Reason #2: You will get rejected every single day of your life.

You ask any actor, and I mean regardless of whatever level of success, and he or she will tell you that rejection is just part of daily life.  I myself get rejected every single time I leave my home, sometimes by powerful network executives, sometimes by ad agencies, and sometimes, when I’m really blessed, by famous people like Sylvester Stallone.  There are a million different ways to deal with this constant rejection.  One way is to tell yourself that getting a job is a roll of the dice, and if your number didn’t come up, then it just wasn’t meant to be.  Another way is to pretend that you actually “learn” something from each and every experience you have, including all the auditions that prove fruitless.  I myself prefer something I call “The Scotch Method.”  Whatever you choose, it ultimately does no good.  Even if you’ve got a hide as tough as mine, every little rejection hurts…every single goddamn one of them.  That’s what “putting yourself out there” entails.  Sure, it takes risk to achieve a big pay-off, but the flip-side of success is always failure.  And failure comes a hell of a lot more often than success in the field of acting.

            There are of course different phases of rejection in an actor’s career.  At the start of things, which is where the vast majority of aspiring performers remain for as long as they can stand to keep plugging away at it, there is the struggle to get representation in order to get the auditions that can lead to acting for a living.  This involves sending a seemingly infinite amount of photographs in the mail to agencies and being told time and time again, “Thank you for your interest, but we are not looking for new talent at this time.”  Another route actors take, if they have the means, is exhausting any connections to the business they might have.  This basically means that instead of being rejected by faceless strangers, you get to be rejected by a friend of a friend (or a friend of a friend of a relative, or a friend of a friend’s relative’s friend) which is a somewhat more embarrassing scenario.  When the agencies and “connections” are done rejecting you, the only thing left is the attempt to get noticed in small, free theater.  This is where the actor finds his or herself being rejected for parts in crappy plays in crappy theaters that pay nothing, not even crap.   And please understand beyond the shadow of a doubt that there is a struggle just to get to all of these rejections, each shot at success coming after blood, sweat and tears are expended at astronomical rates.  These opportunities to be pissed on don’t just come to you.  You have to work for them.  You have to ask favors, kiss ass, and take one leap of faith after another only to be told to fuck off.  (This, by the way, sort of defeats the purpose of leaping in the name of faith.  As far as I can tell.)

            In my case, I managed to get an agent (somehow I convinced him I would make him money) and I get sent out nearly every day, often several times a day, to go and try out for jobs I for the most part don’t really want (I want money, you see, which compels me to put on embarrassing outfits and jump around audition rooms like a spaz.)  Imagine that!  Three, four, five different rejections in one day!  Constant, endless rejection!  Yoo-hoo!  Wa-ba-doo-ba-dee!  (And it is important to note here that I am one of the lucky ones.  And I know that and am very thankful to everyone who ever called me in for an audition.  I’m not being sarcastic here.  I’m genuinely grateful.  Even for that time I had to dress like a sandwich.)

            One of the most aggravating things about being rejected is that the rejecters never actually tell you that you are being rejected.  It’s hideously confusing.  You will never simply be told, “No.”  This is because nobody in show business wants to offend anyone else in show business for fear that it will come back to haunt them.  Actors are tied to agencies, and agencies are tied to writers, and writers are tied to directors, and directors are tied to producers, and producers are tied to executives, so on and so forth.  In an effort to prevent burnt bridges, the jagged little pill called rejection is always sugar-coated.  You’ll experience a litany of excuses for not giving you the job ranging from, “He’s a bit on the young side,” to the ever popular, “We’re going in a different direction.”  And often these excuses are preceded by the phrase, “We love him, but…”  This is a horrible thing for the rejecters to do, because it gives way to the false hope that they might actually want to work with you later down the road, which they don’t.  (Well, sometimes they do, but that wouldn’t read as funny, now would it?)

            After ten years, I don’t cry every time I get rejected.  In fact, I think in all the times I’ve been rejected in my life, I only cried three times, and all three of those times had to do with women, not acting jobs.  But you must know that every single one of the thousands (quite literally) of rejections I’ve experienced has caused pain.  There is no way around it; rejection has an adverse effect on both your psychology and physicality.

            In order to clearly understand what it is like to live a life of rejection, please try the following experiment.  For the next month, hire an imposing and unapologetic man to stand by your bedside every night.  When you wake up in the morning, have him punch you in the face.  (Make sure he does this every day!  No breaks!)  Do not react to the pain, but instead swallow whatever emotions that might rise to the surface.  Go on with the rest of your day pretending to be fully thankful to be alive.  At the end of the month, take stock of where your psychosis is, and then multiply that by at least several thousand.