The Hardest Part is Not Acting

THE HARDEST PART IS NOT ACTING by Neil Schell

I once saw an interview with Billy Bob Thornton in which he made a statement something to the effect of, and I paraphrase hugely, acting is easy, it’s not acting that’s the hard part.

Often these short quips about acting, like “less is more”, trigger all kinds of ideas and possibilities. Sometimes, wrong ideas can be triggered by them as well as correct ones.

What I like about “the hardest part is not acting” is it covers, for me, all the things an actor has to do to take care of their career. The fun part of an acting career is the acting. I mean, why else would you subject yourself to as tough an industry as this? Your love of acting and the effects you can create by doing it of course. There truly is no other answer.

Let’s look at some of the things that make up the “hardest part”, the “not acting” part. Marketing and promotion is a good place to start. Since you yourself are a product you must learn to market and promote yourself. It’s an invariable fact in our society at this time that everything of value has to be sold. Ideas, scripts, clothes, glue sticks, computers, even soap has to be sold. If you don’t sell it, no one thinks its worth anything. An actor who continuously works for free creates the idea that their acting isn’t worth anything. If they don’t sell their acting, no one thinks its worth anything. Part of selling anything, including acting, is marketing and promotion.

The purpose of marketing and promotion is to create an awareness of a product. But, more importantly, it is to create a “want” for the product. There are many excellent texts on how this can be done, so I will not go into it here. But once you see that you are your product and that you must create a want for your product, you realize that you really should find out how to market yourself.

Marketing and promotion are a couple of the “hardest parts” because they aren’t the fun part, the acting part. (Once you realize how important this part is, it becomes fun.) Another hard part is figuring out just exactly what it is you are marketing. If you don’t know, you are kind of like a store owner who says he has this one product that “does everything.” So, tell me, if you were looking for a vacuum cleaner and a store owner came to you and said, “I have this one product that does everything” would you be interested? Even if this “product” could do everything, would it be smart to sell it as such? Wouldn’t it be better to be specific and decide what the product does best and then market it that way?

Let me ask you this; Are you an actor marketing yourself as being able to “do everything” in an attempt to increase your chances? If you are, maybe you should rethink that marketing strategy.

You need to find out what it is you specifically bring to the film and TV industries before you can truly market it. This is hard to do because you need to be objective about your product – you.

As I have said before, there are many “hardest parts” to not acting. One of them is directly in regard to the craft of acting. You see, you really do have to “not act” in order to service your audience. All those actors you love and think are brilliant, you just can’t catch them acting. That takes many, many hours of practice and experience and skill building. It’s debatable as to whether or not this is one of the hard parts of acting. It certainly takes tenacity to follow through with it.

Then there is simply the “not doing anything” when you are playing a scene. The temptation to do something (act) when there really is no true impulse (not act) makes it difficult to “not act.”

The hardest part is not acting. Take care of it.
© Copyright 2009 by Neil Schell
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