1 Economic Concept Actors Must Know


  1. Acting is all about opportunity cost:

Artistically

Your character has choices to make. It’s an actor’s duty to artfully embody the joys and agonies of making those choices.

  • To make the interesting choice, you have to have a keen sense of what your character stands to lose by behaving one way as opposed to another.
  • That’s where imagination comes into play—your audience has to see how things could have gone differently in order to care about what does end up happening.
Take a look at how Philip Seymour Hoffman is not “playing the problem” but instead using the expectations and regret that the character has to try to get what he wants:

Budgeting Your Time & Being Resourceful—Case Study: Narrating for Audiobooks


Narrators who record audiobooks need to make a minimum of about $100 / per finished hour for it to be worth their time. Think carefully:

  • There’s still a good deal of competition and you need the right equipment to get ahead of the curve. That will definitely set you back at least a few thousand dollars.
  • To get the chance to audition, you need to submit a demo reel to producers. So, tack on a modest stipend for someone to direct you to get your best take and an engineer to master the levels. At least a few hundred dollars in overhead there as well.
  • You need to allot at least 120 minutes for each hour of audio you are going to produce because nobody gets an entire segment done and up to scratch correctly in one or even two takes. So, that takes the rate of what you make down to $50 / hour of actual time worked.
  • Then hiring someone to master your final version for you (so that it is professionally done—this is an art—do not make the mistake of submitting it unfinished to a publisher if you want to continue to get more work from that label). Rates vary between 15–25% of your paycheck. Now you are making $25 per effort hour.
  • Oh, and, you don’t get work every week like you would if you were working a 9-5 job.

You have got to realize just how much work you are doing to know what you are actually being paid. Know whether you might want to be living like this:

There are a lot of great jokes about actors in ‘Arrested Development’ but this one strikes pretty close to home: Carl Weathers is an accomplished professional actor. Yet, in mentoring Tobias, here we see him chastising his pupil for not using a nearly completely consumed bone for a stew that might otherwise sustain an actor through harder times.

In the Long Term

You have to really understand opportunity cost if you are mindfully going to stick to being an actor and you are not of the 1%. It is a day-to-day decision about whether you want to forgo the comforts of the kind of:

  • shelter
  • food
  • retirement assets
  • and stability of family life

that peers your age are going to be able to afford by working in other fields. Even if you make a living as an actor, you may want to consider how it will be in the long run:

  • A Broadway veteran once told me that despite his very satisfying artistic life, which had him performing and directing on Broadway and regionally for decades, he cannot expect to enjoy the same kind of sunset years as his friends who worked as something other than actors.

And that, my friends, is sad.