Why acting?

Here’s  a question I get asked a lot: why did I decide to become an actor?The truth is, I don’t have a grandiose story about how acting was my passion and so on. I never even took acting classes in high school. It’s all a very new territory for me, even after two years of doing it. So why do I do it? I could, after all, just sit in my room and write all day. In fact, that’s something I don’t do enough of. And yet, I find myself drawn to acting. It is a lot like writing, in terms of the development process, but is possibly fen more intimate than writing. You really have to know the characters and the roles you are playing, in a way that can really come off as convincing. Lot of people think that acting is just putting on a show for people, in a superficial sense. When I talk to people, I sense they have no idea what it is really like at all. It’s not just a matter of putting on a smile and belting out lines. In fact, that’s one thing that constantly we are reminded of at anodyne: “don’t just read the lines, you’re reciting the lines….”  It is hard work. Really hard work. It’s oddly enough, one of the hardest jobs you can ever do, to get into another persons skin. Yet, It is precisely this that draws me to acting. To be fair, there’s been a lot of drama and conflict that has gotten in the way of perfecting the art of acting. And sometimes, that can really drag me down. Yet, to be capable of transforming into another role, another life, is really an eye opening experience. When I get into a performance, I feel elated, and refreshed at the end, an experience I don’t get very often. This is what happened to me last August. It also provides me a humanistic experience, that I simply don’t get with other parts of my life. This can really benefit me as a writer. After all, in writing, as in acting, it is the humanistic element that brings us into the worlds that are created. Even something such as Star Wars has a humanistic, character driven element. I believe in the power of world building but worlds have to come from somewhere. And when writing a play, especially thought provoking theatre, that character driven, humanistic element is at the very heart of it all.