I used to think that I had been blessed with a talent for acting, but I also thought I’d been cursed. It seemed to me that my neurosis and fear would always end up hampering my talent, keeping me trapped in my head and prevent me from truly being alive in the moment. Every audition I had, I would attempt to hide what I was actually feeling and thinking – the real Greg – and pretend I was feeling and thinking things that I wasn’t. This led to basically having a nervous breakdown during every audition!

I believe acting and auditioning is an act of radical acceptance. It’s not about becoming someone else – it’s about revealing the real you by actually doing something; moving through your fear to get what you want from your reader or scene partner. I think actors cling to and present this “idea of a character” and they use it as a shield to not be seen! We don’t get to see the vulnerability, the human frailty – the fear – we want to see your fear!

What makes the scene work is struggle. And again it’s not a phony character struggle that makes the magic trick work for the audience – it’s seeing your actual struggle as it really is. Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather it’s doing the thing along with or through the fear. This is what we yearn to see from actors – real courage – and you can’t have real courage without real fear.

I realized all this through actually testing it out as an actor and beginning to book work and having my career take off. Suddenly the auditions that seemed impossible because of my anxiety, nerves, fear – I could actually do them and soar! I had One Specific Action, based on the stakes and tone of the scene, that I was actually imperfectly doing no matter what I was feeling or thinking. And they could be real Greg fears – “Oh my god, do they like me?”, “What’s my next line!?” – I just kept coming back to that Other Person and that One Specific Action and this would create the illusion of Character in the mind of the viewer or audience. It turns out people don’t see what we are feeling or thinking – they see what we are doing. The knowledge that all my anxieties and fears were workable energies – that they were actually the fuel, the fulcrum that made the magic trick of the audition work…words fail to express how much freedom and joy this fact has brought to my career and to my life.