Auditions - 2

of those auditions

• Ads - 2 (self-tapes)

March was another slow one, but again I find myself okay with that.

Perhaps this is a conversation I should be having with my rep, but on the whole I find myself happy with the slower pace of auditions at the moment. I am doing a lot of planning behind the scenes; building my casting director database, tracking my auditions, making a plan for who I want to push for this year, but I also know full well that I'm about to make the biggest purchase of my life and there's plenty to do before that particular ball of stress gets rolling.

At the moment I'm excited for the upgrade to my self-tapes the new house will bring. A dedicated space with better lighting and equipment that I can properly experiment with, rather than just get the tape done as quickly as possible so the living room can go back to normal.

The house really does feel like all I can think about right now, but I'm also really excited for upcoming applications for plays, workshops, and masterclasses. Just being involved in the industry as a participant or learner is exciting. I taught a beginners acting for adults class this week and had a blast. Not a paid thing at all, but still massively worthwhile for me. It let me flex my muscles, see how I'm feeling, check in with myself artistically. I worked on an exercise with them that was one of my favorites, leading a partner around the space by guiding their head with your hand, and it really made clear how out of shape I am. I was thinking about applying for a physical theatre workshop with a company I love in July but I'm having second thoughts now. Not exactly the most encouraging realisations to have about yourself, but I'm glad for the chance to realise them.

Thank you for reading by RSS, you're keeping this amazing service alive

Inside the Manosphere is the new documentary from Louis Theroux. Whilst I think the hype around its release was well deserved, and the film does a lot of things right, it seems to be a victim of its own subject matter.

If you don't know anything at all about the "manosphere culture", first off well done, but secondly this is probably a very good watch. The film does a great job of breaking down the key talking points into manageable chunks, and dissecting them through his interviews with some of the subculture's key figureheads.

If, like me, you've sadly been exposed to this stuff before, you're really not going to glean any new insights here. It's very much a surface level examination. That being said, as the film progresses you begin to realise that it couldn't have been anything else

What Inside the Manosphere does exceptionally well is expose these guys for how deeply insecure, shallow, and empty-headed they really are. It shows them as broken men who have taken early childhood trauma and decided that they're going to make their own emotional immaturity everyone else's problem, and it does this by simply pointing a camera at them and letting them talk.

Part of this is due to Louis' George Smiley-eqsue disarming nature. He's more than happy to appear the inoffensive, un-threatening, almost clueless observer, but is dangerous enough to cut through the facade with just the right question at just the right moment. The other part comes from the subjects themselves, and this is where I feel the film shows its limitations.

Because the subjects of his research are so vapid and shallow, we realise pretty quickly that they have very little to say, it's just the same talking points over and over again. Consequently it feels like the documentary has just as little to say, because once they've spoken about gym culture, submissive women and dominant men, Trump, and the Jews, the film turns into long stretches of Louis following them around and watching them be disgusting.

Once you realise how little there is behind the curtain, the painful truth is laid bare. It really is all about the money. It doesn't matter whether these guys really believe the bile they spout or not. It doesn't matter to them, nor does it matter to the bafflingly large entourage of female content creators who seem to orbit these guys. The producers, the models, the OnlyFans creators; if it brings in new followers, then they're happy to go on these podcasts and be ridiculed.

Throughout the film several of the men voice their suspicion of Louis, worried that he's trying to construct some kind of hit-piece against them. In the end, I think they were right, that's exactly what the film is; but Louis didn't do it, they did it to themselves.

Thank you for reading by RSS, you're keeping this amazing service alive

It's the one year anniversary of this blog, and I've been thinking a lot about why I started AHE, what my motivations and goals were, and why I continue to write.

To keep things brief I, like many others, got my start writing a blog/being involved with the Indieweb community through Neocities, after being recommended some Indieweb content on Youtube. My original goal was to learn a bit of html and css, but quickly decided the concept of the site was one that wouldn't hold my interest for very long. It's still up on Neocities somewhere but, like so many others, it's now a scrapped project.

But the ideas and philosophy behind the IndieWeb movement struck a deep, deep chord with me, and brought me back to explore blogging more seriously.

Why did I start AHE?

Owning my content

This one was a no-brainer for me. Call me a luddite, but I've always been somewhat distrustful of the big social media companies. I grew up on sites like Bebo, MSN Messenger, and early Facebook, and got to see sites that I thought of as open, creative, and non-predatory, become the opposite. If I could, I would ditch social media completely and live a happier, more fulfilled life, but the reality is social media (particularly Instagram) is pretty much essential these days, both for finding auditions, and promoting my self produced work.

Having a blog like this feels exactly like what the IndieWeb evangelists describe: my own little corner of the internet. I own AHE. I own the domain, the pictures, and every word of the content I post. I do POSSE it out to Bluesky but that's more for Webmentions than anything else.

I don't think anyone reads this blog. The Bluesky has barely any followers and at this point I think my posts have only ever had likes from two people. That's fine. I'm honestly happy with that. I'm not doing this to amass a huge following, I'm doing it for myself. If anyone happens to find it interesting or wants to engage, that's great, but this blog serves its purpose whether anyone reads it or not.

Anonymity

This one's tricky, and I mention it pretty regularly in my posts.

I really struggle to decide how open I should be. On the one hand I want to be as honest as possible on this blog; I want to talk about what it takes to work in the arts, and the reality of trying to live a sustainable life in an inherently unsustainable career. I want to talk about leading a healthy social life whilst working horrible, unsociable hours at a day-job that you find unfulfilling.

But the very nature of having this unusual job means that I can be pretty easily identified by readers determined enough to figure out who I am. Sure, I might be doing some local theatre work right now, but back in the day I was in a pretty big TV show with a fair few famous actors in it, and if I go on to do high profile work again and people find this blog, I don't want my words being used against me.

Reading this back, I know how silly this sounds. It isn't even a fear of "being cancelled" or anything, but this industry is obsessed with reputation, and will go to great lengths to avoid theirs being tarnished. If I'm honest about some of the jobs I've worked or the people I've worked with, there's a chance that my words could come back to bite me, no matter how hard I try to remove any identifying details.

That being said, this blog does provide me some level of anonymity. Nothing here has my real name on it, and the contact email is a generic AHE address. If I'm careful I know I can get away with saying things on here that I would never dream of putting on a professional Instagram or Facebook.

The end result is a blog that sits somewhere between a professional social media account, and my personal pen-and-paper diary (yes, I keep one of those too). A happy medium where I can say what I feel the need to say, whilst exercising a little healthy restraint. No-one needs to read my real diary after all. For the moment I'm, not happy, but accepting of this situation. I'll probably always want to be more brash, to name names, but I think the discipline will pay off in the long run.

Built for sustainability

I've talked a little about my passion for environmentalism in a previous post, but a big part of why I do this is to promote a healthier engagement with the internet both for myself and other people.

It feels a little ridiculous to say that I'm writing a blog about my acting career for environmental reasons, or because it's inherently more ethical than using Instagram or Blogger or whatever. Surely, with there being no ethical consumption under capitalism, the only choice is to not engage, right? Not having a blog at all must be better than having one? But I think that falls into a pretty destructive, nihilistic trap. Who benefits from you not engaging with the world around you? Who benefits from you not putting yourself out there? You don't, that's for sure! But if you're a billionaire tech bro rolling out a new slew of anti-consumer terms and conditions, or a far right lobby group looking to pass oppressive legislation, a disengaged, uninspired populace unwilling to challenge the status-quo is your best fucking friend.

Do I think I'm going to solve any major global issue with this blog? No. But repeatedly exercising the muscles that made me start AHE in the first place keep those ideas at the front of my mind. Since I started writing regularly here I've become more clear in my convictions, and more adept at breaking down my thoughts and feelings about what's happening around me. Art is a human endeavour, a holistic practice, it affects our life as much as our life affects it, and keeping that circle moving is how we grow.

A little about BearBlog

You're probably wondering why the alternate title for this post is what it is, a fair question. This is more of a recommendation than anything else.

For me, my favourite IndieWeb-adjacent project right now is BearBlog. A quick look at what Bear is and how Bear works should give you plenty of clues about why I like it as a service, it seems to be setting out to meet every criteria it can whilst still making an easy to use service that helps people cross that barrier to entry that coding poses.

I wish AHE ran on Bear, but there are plenty of reasons it doesn't...

• AHE started off as a way for me to learn coding which have been as prominent a part of the Bear experience.
• I like having complete control of the site, and relying on another service to host my work seemed to defeat the purpose of what I was going for.
• I'm cheap and didn't want to subscribe to another service.

but there are loads of reasons I wish it did. The user experience is clean and simple, stories of customer support seem genuinely wonderful, and it would save me a lot of hassle updating post lists, RSS feeds, and Webmention features manually every time.

But the best part of Bear is the community. Nearly every time I find myself really enjoying someones blog, I find that little Bear at the bottom smiling at me.

The blog I return to most often is NotesbyJCProbably. Jedda has taken the concept of sharing her life and turned it into an art form. Her pictures are gorgeous and transporting, and her writing is often vulnerable, personal, and inspiring, but always engaging. Her weeknotes (a feature which seems to have taken a break recently) acts as a gateway to blogs across the IndieWeb that have resonated with her. A little curated tasting menu designed to get you clicking and reading and clicking and reading. I've spent many commuting hours going through her postrolls looking for the next hidden gem.

Discoverability on Bear is a feature I wish was possible outside of its unfortunately walled garden. I've made a point to join as many IndieWeb directories as I can, but there's never a guarantee that your application will be seen, let alone read and accepted. Hell, it took me long enough to get the Indie Webring working.

But the community on Bear is emblematic of what I love about the wider IndieWeb community. It's a bunch of incredibly passionate creatives from all walks of life who see the value in sharing for sharing's sake. Nobody is out here farming likes, or engagement-baiting. We're here because we love it, because it's important to us, because it's worth it. It feels like a net positive in a time when those are very hard to come by.

What's next for AHE?

I was talking to a friend of mine recently about writing, specifically about actors writing, and he mentioned the importance of artists "seizing the means of creative production". Aside from just liking that phrase, he's right. Staying creative under your own steam is essential. If you only do it when a job comes through not only will you be out of practice when the job arrives, but you'll spend less time over all doing what you love.

That's probably the biggest thing I've taken from working on this blog for the past year, and what I really want to continue to take forward. Writing this blog has helped me remain present and proactive in my personal and creative life. Every month I get to break down where I am in my career and plan ahead for the next. Every month I get to reflect on what I've been feeling, and how my emotions shape my decision making. It's a little bit like therapy in public.

That's not to say I don't write some articles with an audience in mind. I wrote a post about whether or not you should go to drama school with the full intention of writing several other posts about the topic, from audition planning, to what to expect when you get there. I think I would have liked similar write-ups when I was auditioning. When I first started out I scoured the internet for blogs by drama students and found one that stuck with me, where the writer spoke for nearly a whole paragraph about the struggle to fill up her water bottle before the audition. It drove me up the wall, and I vowed I would come up with something better. At some point I will. It's in the drafts at the moment. Like everything else.

There's also something quite nice about having a project I can look back on in a number of years and see how far I've come. Every brick laid, every step taken.

I don't have any further plans for this blog beyond what it already does. Like I said earlier, AHE achieves its goals whether anyone reads it or not; it is, first and foremost, a space for me to write. Sure, I'll keep tinkering with the features (I'm still not entirely sure about the "What's New" section on the homepage), and maybe the design will change at some point, but I only ever wanted the design and features of AHE to support and facilitate the writing, and they do that pretty well. For now, the best thing I can do is keep writing. Maybe one day someone will read it and reach out.

So here's to our first year on AHE. With any luck, the first of many yet to come.

Thank you for reading by RSS, you're keeping this amazing service alive

The idea that it's only been 20 days since I last updated this site is crazy to me. I honestly don't know where to start with everything that's happened so I'm just going to go through them in chronological order.

First off, I got word from my agent that I was down to the final two for a film role I taped for months ago, and they were asking for my availability ahead of sending my tape back to the director for second consideration. I fully thought I was out of the running for this and had basically moved on, but then the casting directors message my agent and emphasize the urgency of getting this sorted out. Unfortunately I was half way through rehearsals for the touring play at this point, and filming would clash with one of the last performances on the tour. I stated my commitment to the job I was already working and said my availability would be limited by this one day. The movie role wasn't even being offered to me, it was just a diary check, nothing more. Unfortunately, due to some crossed wires, the outcome was less than ideal...

I lost my role in the touring play half way through rehearsals. I was devastated. Whilst I was on the phone telling my agent that I was committed to this job and that my availability would be limited, the theatre company were on the phone to other actors trying to save their show. In the time it took me to finish one call, the damage had been done, and my role was recast. It was over in about ten minutes.

It shouldn't have gone down like that. I spent the rest of the night on the phone trying to salvage the situation, but nothing worked. The other guy had already turned down other work and the theatre company felt a sense of responsibility for him. I packed up my stuff and came back home first thing the next morning.

I spent the next day in bed recovering. My partner was an angel, she kept me laughing through it all and helped me process what went wrong. Now that the dust has settled I do feel like I've moved past it, and I've definitely come out of it with a newfound sense of conviction and self-confidence, but I'd be lying if I said it doesn't still sting. It really was a dream role on a great project. I miss it.

And I still don't know if I got the movie.

On a lighter note, within a few days of losing the job, my partner and I started house hunting, found a place we loved, put in an offer, and had it accepted. We can't wait to move in, but the administrative and legal work required to make the necessary plates spin is exhausting and stressful. It's a great position to be in, but considering I left by day-job not long ago, and lost out on a pretty decently paid acting job mid way through, my bank account is starting to feel the pressure.

As I write this it's 01:24am. I'm snatching what little alone time I have to satisfy the urge to write that I've been carrying around for a few weeks now. I desperately need to get words down. The very act of writing has been pulling at me, but the thought of coming away from what we're going through to indulge in anything fictional feels like it wouldn't do me any kind of therapeutic good. So here I am blogging again.

My drafts folder is growing. I don't know when, or if, any of them will come out and I still find myself struggling with exactly how much I want to share, but I don't think I can write anything else right now. I need to process what's going on right in front of me. Art can come later.

Thank you for reading by RSS, you're keeping this amazing service alive

I really over-booked myself this Christmas: I took on loads of shifts on top of rehearsing the January play, and still tried to see friends as often as possible. Don't get me wrong, a lot of it was worth it, but I didn't get much of a chance to really slow down and enjoy much of it.

The one chance I did get for a bit of me-time came when I was washing the dishes a few days before Christmas, when I decided to put on White Christmas, one of my favourite holiday movies.

So much of what I love about this film - and so many others - is everything that goes along with it. The Ephemera. There's a word used in arts restoration for things like this and for the life of me I can't remember it and it's driving me insane.... begins with a P I think... PROVENANCE.

Anyway, the things that I think about when I think about White Christmas are the conversations I have with my Mum every time I get to watch it with her. Quite often we re-tread similar territory, but theres a lot of very old memories wrapped up in them. Every year we talk about how incredible Rosemary Clooney's dresses are, how Vera Ellen was probably the best dancer in the world, how underrated Danny Kaye was, how you'd never get a child going en-point like that anymore (thankfully).

My favourite song in the entire film is "Love, You Didn't Do Right By Me". It's a weirdly haunting song for a film like this, and Christmas is an under-rated spooky season for sure. Plus, even though I'm not much of a musical theatre person, maybe naively, it's the one song I think I could sing reasonably well. But, wrapped up in my love of that song, is my Mum sat there pointing out an early movie appearance of George Chikaris, star of one of her favourite films, West Side Story.

I think about her a lot when I watch that film. I think about me and her sat watching it after the decorations go up, often just the two of us since Dad is still at work. Big silly grins on our faces the entire time.

I'm glad I got to see them this year. We couldn't make it up north for the holidays, and my partner and I were preparing to spend it on our own when they got in touch to say they'd booked an AirBNB for the week. I don't get to see them nearly as often as I'd like but we make every effort we can to take advantage when an opportunity arises.

I have a similar thing with my Dad, though for a very different film.

When I was a kid and my Dad put me to bed, I had this tactic for getting him to stay with me longer: I would ask him about his favourite movies, films that I was a long way off being old enough to see. I remember vividly him telling me about all the Jaws movies, being totally confused when he tried to explain the plots of the (at the time) two Terminator films, and about the one film that gave him nightmares, Alien!

But there was one film that he alluded to but never outright told me about, Trainspotting.

"I'm not going to tell you what it's about, but we'll watch it when you're old enough. I think you'll like it."

On or near my eighteenth birthday, Dad and I sat down and put Trainspotting on, and suddenly the soundtrack CD he'd been playing in his car since I was a kid exploded into life.

Trainspotting has a lot of cultural cache for Scottish people, regardless of age. I was born in the nineties, I wasn't a part of that culture, the rave scene well and truly passed me by, and I was too young to really notice what heroin was doing to people back then, but that didn't seem to matter. These guys spoke like me, ran down streets I knew, had that same sense of humour as the folk I grew up with. Hell, my Dad even had the Begbie 'tache when I was younger.

This wasn't a film that showed my life laid bare on the screen like it was for so many people, but it was the film I shared with my Dad; the film my Dad waited eighteen years to share with me.

A few years later, when I was about to leave home for drama school, the sequel came out. We had both been through quite a lot by then: I had started my career and pretty quickly got picked up to do some fairly big TV work, as well as theatre jobs that took me away for several months at a time; there were health scares, job changes, Brexit, break-ups; things just seemed different. We were in a period of change.

Seeing that film felt very different to the first. Trainspotting feels like the possibilities of being young, showing you what's out there. T2 is about that change, getting older, growing up, finding yourself again further down the road. I think about a lot when I see those films: my country, my culture and the culture that shaped me, the path I'm on, and the people I've crossed paths with along the way. I think about my Dad. I think about becoming a man, and the kind of man I want to be.

Those films both make me sob like I'm a kid again.

Thank you for reading by RSS, you're keeping this amazing service alive