Why Only the Rich Will Be Actors
Nobody tells you how expensive it is to be an actor. Even if you avoid the grifters and hucksters, it is not something most people can afford… and it’s getting worse.
Suzie Izzard used to do a bit about hanging around at film studios as a child, hoping she’d be “discovered”, creeping round the studio lot until some big-wig noticed and said “hey — a creeping kid! Just what I need for my new movie: The Creeping Kid!”. I think that must be how all of us picture breaking into the movies — that a loud, American man, holding a clapper board, wearing a beret, sunglasses and jodhpurs will yell out to us across the street:
You there, kid! You’ve got it! I’m going to make you a star!
Bizarrely, it has happened — it just doesn’t happen often. In a turn of fate that I can only describe as “Peak White South-African”, Charlize Theron was discovered and turned into a star when someone overheard her yelling at the staff in a bank*.
Trying to break into acting like that is largely like trying to become a financial success by playing the lottery. It will work for a handful of people, entirely by accident, but the remaining 99.9999999% of us can forget it.
Most actors get into acting the same way that the proverbial musician gets into Carnegie Hall: practice. We study to get good, and then we go out and hustle for jobs. Over time, we build up a regular list of collaborators and colleagues and, if we are incredibly lucky, we might be able to make a living only acting.
If most actors, then, must put our shoulders to the boulder and push for years or even decades, rather than be discovered and go to the A-list straight away, what does that have to do with wealth? Rich or poor, everyone has to keep pushing away in their Sisyphus-like task — would that not represent a meritocracy?
There’s an old joke that goes like this:
Why don’t actors look out of the window in the morning? Because otherwise they’d have nothing to do in the afternoon.
The point being that actors spend most of our time not acting. We’re grafting away trying to find roles, make contacts and actually connect with people who might want to cast us. This is the First Point I must ask you to remember.
Here is the Second Point: when we do act, we aren’t paid much. There is a recent story, possibly apocryphal, about a customer in a coffee shop being served by a barista whom they saw on television only the night before in a major drama series.
We can easily recreate the ensuing exchange:
“You’re famous! You’re on the telly! What are you doing here?”
“This is my day-job. It pays the bills.”
To further drive this home, you must understand that multi-million dollar contracts are only for the Big Name Actors. People who can draw an audience to a film just by virtue of their being in it. Studios will pay a king’s ransom to snag a Big Name Actor. The rest of us work for scale: the minimum rates negotiated by Equity, SAG-AFTRA, ACTRA etc.
In summary: we don’t get to act that much and, when we do, we most definitely have no issues whatsoever with fitting our remunerations into our hungry wallets. There’s plenty of room.
Movie studios do not, in actuality, exist to make movies. They exist to make profit for their owners and any shareholders. Films generally do not make much money — even blockbuster Summer event movies — because the business structure around movie making siphons profits away to partners (those legions of logos at the start of every film) and funnels expense and debt into the film project.
This is why various Hollywood studios have been sued multiple times for withholding royalties and due payments: when the time comes to share the spoils… on paper the film made next to no money, whilst its partners and producers added millions to their bank accounts.
Not only does this affect actors, since we are sometimes lucky enough to get residuals from films we appear in, but it also changes the way studios think about everything they produce.
The studio does not exist to make films: they exist to make profit.
With periodic exceptions, this means the studios will look to bankable stars: persons who will draw a crowd by themselves. They will also look to leverage online personalities: influencers, YouTubers, gamers and so on.
What room then for the up-and-coming actor looking for their next role? Even cartoons, once the province of professional voiceover artists, are now swamped with A-Listers and influencers. Regardless of whether their talents lend themselves to cartoon voice work, these big names and pre-built audiences betray the real purpose — to make lots of money; artistic merit or entertainment value be damned.
This is the Third Point I will ask you to remember: it’s hard for unknowns to get the bigger roles because bigger roles go to those who are already well-known.
Much has been said about how AI is going to affect the Arts. AI can produce passable digital artwork; it can edit and rewrite copy; it can reproduce voice prints and it can reproduce actor likenesses. Whether it has any artistic merit — the question of “whether or whither an unfeeling machine can produce art?” is a philosophical quandary beyond my ken — or how it stacks up against real artists is sadly a rhetorical one.
Studios exist to make money. The question is not one of “can this machine produce a performance that will move or affect the audience?”, but rather “can this machine do well enough to let us sack the actor and reduce our expenses?”
For example, I have heard all of the major players’ attempts at AI audiobook narrators. They are all varying degrees of fine. They sound like a person with a nice voice reading text from a page, and they add some inflexion around tone where appropriate. They do an adequate job.
As an actress who has narrated several audiobooks I am somewhat biased. As someone who has spent years eschewing a bill-paying barista job in favour of a bill-paying software engineering role, I am familiar with the mechanisms through which AI — specifically our current crop of large-language-set pre-trained, generative, transformer artificial intelligences — function. I feel, thus, both informed and sober enough about its skills to make comment.
AI will never do better than ok. Without going into a deep-dive, AI does not and cannot understand what it’s doing: it is only applying probabilities to input and producing the most likely output.
What does this mean in practice for, say, an audiobook?
- It does not understand which character is talking, so it cannot apply any consistent differentiation such as dialect, tone or cadence. All the characters will sound the same.
- It does not see the arc of the story. A human narrator will try to trick listeners away from too-obvious plot turns; we will up-the-stakes at key moments and will offer a sense of completion at the denouement. AI cannot do that and never will, it can only mimic it kinda sorta.
- AI cannot feel a scene — turning down the heat in an overwritten, melodramatic scene or ramping up the drama in an underwritten, dull scene.
- It cannot see the objectives of the characters and so cannot give any clue as to who they are or what they want. Insincere characters will intone the same as sincere characters. Protagonists will speak like antagonists. The stoic parent figure will not differ from the calculating, cold Duke or the passionate, brave freedom fighter.
Sufficient, then, it would be to observe that AI isn’t as good as a good narrator, or actor, or artist, or writer and so on. The problem is that it might just be good enough.
Let’s detour, just for a moment.
Have you ever noticed that mp3 is the default for all consumer audio? This is despite it being a licensed technology: mp3 is a proprietary format so software and device makers must pay licensing fees. Additionally, it is a lossy format. mp3 files are small because their compression loses some of the data.
Well now, suppose that I told you that flac is a free alternative, with no licensing costs, that is also lossless? It compresses files but loses no data whatsoever. It’s compatible with all major computer systems, and lots of hardware, and most people have not heard of it.
Let’s put mp3/flac in our back pocket for a moment and mention VHS. Video Home System was a cassette format used for video, before we had DVDs and Blu-Ray. VHS was also inferior to its competitor, Betamax. VHS had worse video quality and worse audio quality. Betamax cassettes were smaller. Betamax got to market a year before VHS. So, why were nearly all video cassettes sold since the early 1980s VHS? Because VHS cassettes were longer. You could record more on them. A VHS cassette could record an entire Superbowl broadcast, whereas Betamax needed two cassettes.
VHS won out because it was good enough for what people wanted. mp3 is the default format for consumer audio because it is good enough for what people want.
AI might just do the same thing. Sure, it can’t play all the different characters in an audiobook, but maybe the fact you could have your favourite book read to you by a facsimile of your favourite celebrity will be good enough. The studio will pay the actor a small licensing fee, and then the studio can just press a button and KA-THUNK Great Expectations as read by James Corden drops in to the Audible store. And KA-THUNK Moby Dick as read by PewDiePie pops into the Spotify library. And KA-THUNK Far From the Madding Crowd as read by ex-President (and, I’ve no doubt, soon to be Führer of the United States) Donald Trump launches a putsch into the iTunes book store.
Remember our Golden Rule: the studios don’t care if what they make is good art. They don’t care if it is good, full-stop. They care about making money.
This then is the essence of Point Four: AI might operate in the meh-to-okay space of acceptability, but for a lot of purposes it is good enough for the studio to turn a still-bigger profit.
I feel it is important, here, to join up an obvious connection between studio behaviour and the larger Neo-Liberal, Capitalist project. Firstly, however, I must address, directly, the elephant in the room who is trying desperately to hide his swastika banner behind the potted plant: Hollywood is not run by Jewish people and this is nothing whatsoever to do with that ghastly vision of ‘The Happy Merchant’, screwing everyone over for a fast buck.
Hollywood is run by Capitalists who want to make money (the raison d’être of Capitalism). The faults and failures of that system, and of the state of The Arts more generally, lies squarely with the politics of Capitalism and profit-over-all. Thatcher and Reagan made it mainstream, and every politician since has followed that path to wealth beyond the wildest fever-dreams of avarice, lining their pockets in the new Gilded Age of robber-barons.
Scapegoating an entire group of people for the greed of others is reprehensible and futile. The Jewish people suffer quite enough under Capitalism, as do we all, without then being blamed for Capitalism whilst others simultaneously and gleefully empty the register into their wallets. In all communities, individuals may vary — but, on the whole, the Jewish people are a super bunch whom we should feel privileged to count as our siblings on this Earth.
The sad fact that Anti-Semitism never truly seems to be vanquished is bad enough, but the recent rise in Anti-Semitic rhetoric, abuse and violence is despicable. We were supposed to have learnt this lesson after the last time some jackass said “You know who has it too easy? The Jews! You know who doesn’t get a fair shake? The extreme Right!”, though it seems this is a lesson we are fated to relearn through practical experience every one hundred years or so.
Accepting, then, that unchecked Capitalism is the root of the problems around The Arts we must also join the dots through to the gig economy. Most of us artists are participants in the gig economy: we create, we make, we deliver to platforms that monetise our work in return for very little. Whether it’s YouTube, Twitch, DeviantArt, or whatever, we generate what actually draws visitors to the platform and thus puts eyeballs in front of ads. Those large companies make fortunes in advertisement revenue whilst we, the suckers, make their content for them in return for usually nothing or possibly a small cut.
We do it because we are creatives. We must create, and what good is creating if you cannot then gift that creation to the world at large?
But this should sound familiar: a large group of strivers, working to better themselves and create Art to move people, but who are almost entirely very poorly paid. There is even a similar carrot dangled ahead of the YouTubers et al: make content good enough to get 𝑥 subscribers and we might pay you!
Indeed, get a few million-or-so followers and perhaps even Hollywood studios will come knocking on your door!
It’s the same grift as what faces actors and creatives across The Arts. A very few will make a living, of whom a microscopic percentage will get rich, whilst the rest of us tend bar and wait tables.
This is the Fifth Point I want to entrust to you: Capitalism generally, and the gig-economy especially, encourages creative work for no remuneration. It is simply not valued.
Let’s review together the lie of the land:
- Nearly all actors spend their time not acting.
- Nearly all actors, when they do act, are not paid much.
- Any role of size will go to a Big Name Actor.
- AI represents a good-enough replacement for Small Time Actors.
- Our economies place no value on creative people, so they are not remunerated. It only values work-work: office work, manual work, customer-service work.
There is one last point to discuss together, and it is this: acting is expensive.
Excepting that yes, a very few persons might be discovered whilst eating a Big Mac or be lucky enough to make it big on YouTube, most actors are trained.
If not acting school, then we are trained through workshops, coaching and one-to-one tuition. We need to be trained in order to do the job well to land work that can put bread on the kitchen table, a shilling in the meter, stave off the Landlord for another week and light the fire. That takes dough — not least of all because we usually spend years training, and all the time we are training we are not working and thus not bringing in money.
Unfortunately the meter still needs feeding. The bread bin does not refill itself. The Landlord is unwilling to write-off the rent for this week and, for want of a fire, Jack Frost is keen to start drawing pretty ice pictures inside the window, as well as out.
During an actor’s down time, we are advised to take the opportunity to train more. Brush up our skills, we are told. After all, time not spent acting is time spent getting rusty when our saws should be gleaming and sharp. If you don’t use it, you lose it! This means that even once we do graduate from whatever course of teaching formed us as creatives, we’re expected to walk back into training regularly to make best use of our not-acting time.
Those courses are, naturally, not free. Indeed there is an entire grift economy built around teasing actors with “Secrets you need to know!” or “Sure-fire ways to land that audition!” or “Personal, game-changing tuition from an industry pro!”, the latter — predictably — being another creative trying to bring their income at least within striking distance of their expenses.
Then there is the travel. Many auditions require you to come into the studio, even though after the COVID pandemic it felt like we were moving to a remote-first model. Even jobs that can be done fully remotely, such as voiceover, are just as likely to require in-studio appearance.
I cannot speak to what travel is like in other countries, but in the UK our train system (an unmitigated success story of privatisation under Thatcher) is slow, frequently delayed and charges commuters sums that bring tears to the eye. An off-peak return ticket from Manchester to London (160 miles / 260 kilometres) costs as much as one month’s energy bills — as of writing, around £150–200 ($250 USD).
Of course, one must also have the equipment needful to record at home. For voiceover artists like myself, this means expensive studio setups. For regular actors it means, at the very least, a decent phone camera; lighting; a plain backdrop; a tripod or equivalent and a computer to edit the video on.
Then there are other expenses that must be found. Union dues: if you’re not in a Union then you should join one. Software expenses: Microsoft Office, Source Connect for remote direction and Adobe products for professional video and audio editing. Membership expenses: Spotlight, and any number of other casting directories, are a necessity and charge actors to be listed. Online groups and memberships, some of which have the grift-bug and will charge for admission.
All this in a world where living costs are increasing. This is especially true in the UK, where food costs; energy costs; housing costs and travel costs have increased dramatically. Food alone has gone up 50% since 2016.
That, however, is still not the end of the expenses. In a world of casting directors, producers, agents and contacts an actor will have many persons with whom they must keep friendly contact. That means Christmas gifts, birthdays, New Year’s wishes, thank-you notes and presents. Oftentimes with these tokens we’re unofficially competing with other actors, trying to pick something memorable and of good quality but not so outrageously overpriced as to make the recipient feel guilty or obligated. It is expensive and it is exhausting.
This is, then, our Sixth and final Point of note: living is expensive and living as an actor even more so.
We’re here, at last. After I’ve taken us down the garden path, introducing every flower by name along the way! Finally: why only the rich will be able to be actors.
These are the six reasons, as we have discussed them:
- Nearly all actors spend their time not acting.
- Nearly all actors, when they do act, are not paid much.
- Any role of size will go to a Big Name Actor.
- AI represents a good-enough replacement for Small Time Actors.
- Our economies place no value on creative people.
- Living costs are high, and living as an actor even more so.
There’s a secret, Seventh Point in addition to these six — it is that Points One through Six are getting more pronounced every day.
Every single day, one or more of these things happen in The Arts:
- Desperately unfulfilled by an economic model, which will not be satisfied until we all of us work for Deliveroo or Amazon as ‘freelance agents’ for no benefits, more and more people turn to The Arts — either as a creative outlet or under the misguided belief it’ll make them rich — and add to the pool of talent available.
- Because our economy places no value on creative output, only on labour in service to a boss, the number of available places to be a creative shrinks and consolidates as smaller players cannot survive — let alone compete. Indie games studios are bought up. Independent music labels are consolidated. Micro-studios are gobbled up by larger competitors.
- Desperate for ever growing wealth and success, the shareholders are paid a little more and the talent paid a little less for signing away more rights. Even when pay isn’t being cut for the likes of Special Effects artists, CGI designers and voice artists it certainly doesn’t increase in line with inflation and costs.
- The small-time jobs that allow creatives to gain experience, confidence and exposure are being whittled down by AI doing a “good enough” effort for a fraction of the cost. Narration, audiobooks, background walla/looping, extras: all of these roles are at threat and all of them have helped great artists came up.
- People with Big Names are grabbing even smaller roles. Once, animation was looked down on by proper actors and so was the province of specialists like me. Now, though, as the drive to make projects as commercial as is possible Big Name actors will take anything. When they’re not available, influencers with pre-made audiences will do. And when they’re not available, an AI clone can stand in for them. For example: I love the man as an actor, but James Earl Jones has licensed his voice to Disney in perpetuity — which means no other actor will ever be able to voice Darth Vader. Ever. It will be an AI clone of JEJ long after he’s retired and passed on. James was a young, fresh actor once and I can tell you for a fact that right now, in LA alone, there are thousands of new young, fresh, gifted Black actors who would love a chance at such an iconic role. But it has gone forever. I think that is tragic.
- As things get tighter, since Late Stage Capitalism is an ouroboros, so the grifts get sharper. Prices go up, rates for study courses increase, software costs increase, subscriptions go up and even more people turn to the tutoring/mentoring/gatekeeping grift. Make no mistake: some tutors are legitimately excellent. Most, however, have no track record; no history of tutees who have gone on to excellence and no interest in their students beyond money.
Let us consider the normal person, then. A normal person does not exist in the leisure class: their family are not wealthy enough to provide for them in perpetuity. A normal person will need to find money for, in no particular order:
- Rent, mortgage or contribution to the household.
- Food, either for themselves exclusively or as a contribution to the household.
- Bills: their own, and/or the household’s.
- Clothes, household items and other necessities.
- Leisure. Take it from someone who has tried the “live frugally, save money, no expenses” bullshit trip from the likes of professional reptile and sapient emetic Tim Gurner: without some leisure outlets and treats, you will drive yourself into misery; depression and eventually break down. Humans cannot meaningfully exist without any pleasure, and in our world, right now, everything beyond a walk outside costs.
What then must our normal person do? Why, they must have a job, of course. A job sufficient to pay for not only those necessities of life, even if one were to stay at home with parents, but also sufficient for all the expenses of a creative. We are focussing on actors, so let’s create a shopping list:
- Acting school
- Acting workshops
- Improv workshops
- Acting for screen classes
- Acting for stage classes
- Voice classes
- Self-tape equipment
- Voiceover equipment
- Software licenses for video/audio editing
- Coaching, for specific roles and dialects
- Union memberships
- Directory/subscription memberships
- Other subscriptions
Some of those are one-off expenses — initial training won’t need to be done more than once, and, dependent upon the whims of planned obsolescence, equipment shouldn’t need replacing often. Some of them are regular expenses like software, dues and subscriptions. Some of them are supposed to be regular expenses, like workshops, but I’ll be damned if I can see how to afford them.
What sort of job can you name right now that will provide for life and limb, and all the expenses associated with professional acting, and that will provide flexible time for extra training, to go to auditions and even to take possibly weeks away at a time for filming or performing?
I can’t name one. Can you? Certainly not my day-job writing software — my situation only exists because I know the company and have worked with them many times before. I’m lucky to have wrangled what I have, and still any time away comes out of my holiday, thereafter unpaid, and even then I’m expected to work it around my hours and even then I’m earning £10,000 a year less to “pay” for that flexibility in my contract.
Let us consider the wealthy person. The wealthy person likely comes from a wealthy family. They will have a home and life’s needs met, without obligation to pay their share. They’ll be supported in what they do, and probably even have training paid for them by their family. The regular work of paying to exist, which the rest of us endure, isn’t a concern to the wealthy person. Neither is the shopping list of requirements to be a creative.
These are the One-Percenters who, granted, are not billionaires. Probably not even millionaires. But they are “comfortable” and can afford to do by-and-large what they like as long as they are not too reckless. If they fail, a safety net will catch them; set them upright; and then they can try again. If they get bored, then they can try something else.
After them, of course, there are the Point-One-Percenters. Legitimate millionaires, often from acting dynasties, who based on family name and reputation alone can, at absolute least, count on joining the B-list of Big Name Actors.
These two variants of the wealthy person do not need to find those expenses of life which saddle the rest of us. Moreso, they do not need to find work to pay for their acting career — remember, most actors spend their time not acting but our acting expenses need paying regardless — and so are fresh and bright at any audition at a moment’s notice.
Meanwhile, the schlubs like you and I are requesting leave and hoping we’ll get an afternoon slot so we won’t need a peak-hours train ticket.
Capitalism, my friend, has thus rendered acting as only the province of the wealthy. The little jobs dry up, the studios consolidate behind Big Names and Big Production Franchises, and as you and I rush home from our barista jobs to buy a Christmas gift on sale for our agents before the shops close… the wealthy can afford to play the long game, essentially setting themselves up to buy as many lottery tickets as needed to scoop the big one.
After all, they have all the time in the world whilst you and I have our eyes on the clock. Two hours until we can break for lunch, then rush to record that audition, then back to work again until 6pm. That’s when we’re supposed to do outreach, and maybe post on social and YouTube to “build a following”. But we’ll probably work until 7pm. And then it’s shower time. Then we need food — my, hasn’t it gotten pricey lately? — and then we’re shattered. Maybe just an hour of TV then bed. We’ve a meeting at 9am tomorrow.
…but maybe some day, some how. We are creatives, after all.
The images used in this article are baloney I created with AI. Use them, reuse them as you like. AI sucks and should go in the bin.
*Footnote: this is spun as part of a rags-to-riches story — how Theron was desperately trying to cash a check whilst living in poverty in LA — but for context she is descended from Huguenots and her great-grand-uncle was a major military commander. Her mother sent her money and paid for her to fly to LA. She also had money enough to attend dance and drama academies before walking straight into a film role.
Make your own mind up, I guess, but regardless of the difficulties she had while young with a physically abusive father, I don’t quite see this as the slum-dog millionaire origin story it’s painted as. Sounds to me like she obviously trained hard but was very supported and never in any real danger of living on the streets or what-not. Hey ho.
