Never make excuses

The Words of Wisdom this week are Never Make Excuses.

A few years ago I sat in on auditions for a film on which I was script consultant. After a few hours of auditioning I came to the conclusion that a ggod half of the auditionees would open their interview by announcing that they were sufferong from a cold. This seemed very odd as few of them showed overt cold symptoms, though many were ill-prepared on the script excerpt they'd been sent a couple of days before, and there was certainly no epidemic in progress in the city at large. I eventually decided that what they were suffering from was not a normal cold but rather an Actor's Cold, that is simply an excuse for a poor performance and possibly a (vain) hope that they would get bravery points for struggling against illness.

Further study showed that an excuse was frequently that they had been too busy to prepare in the time available (not a recommendation to a director who wants you to drop everything for a chance to appear in his pet project). Another one, combined with a late arrival, was the Actor's Horrific Journey. This was produced as if it were justification for being too upset to audition properly. Careful analysis showed that factors involved in the journey were an inability to read a map (the map's fault) and the Actor's Bus Wait, in which a wait of four minutes is inflated to fifteen and a wait of nine minutes becomes half an hour.

None of these excuses makes a recommendation: at best they make an actor look weak, at worst dishonest. More than that, makinig up excuses is preparing to fail - hunting around for a reason so that a failure will not be your own fault. And frequently it's not your own fault, it's the name of the game so deal with it: there's no need for excuses. And the way to deal with it is to be well prepared so you can be confident that you won't need any excuses to prop you up.

Of course I'm not aiming a broadside at all actors. Many do not fall into the excuse trap and they stand out as beacons of professionalism. You can be like that, too. Let the director be the one who notices your (real) cold so you can tell them, bravely, "It's OK, I'm fine."

So, unless you're appearing in The X Factor, in which case the recent death of an elderly relative or saving a puppy from drowning will enhance your chances no end ... never, never, never; never, ever, never; Never make excuses!