Just had a casting and waited over an hour in a packed waiting room with anxious but annoyed actors. The brief went out at 11:30 for a12:00 call. It was with a new company so some forgiveness was in order.

The commonly purported idea the actors are self involved, lazy or pretentious is one that I’ve never understood. I understand that there are some people out there like that, and some fantastically bad ones at that. And there are reasons for those things. But by and large actors are people with the guts to share emotionally and the experience to pull together as a team on a slightly higher probability than a normalized cross section of people.

The happy things to take away from this experience today are:
A) when the order of arrival got lost the actors all politely took over and reordered by arrival.
B) all actors were pleasant warm and supportive of each other and the poor VERY new reception who was standing in as CD for some of the time.
C) the CD was warm friendly and supportive and thankful for our time.

When bad castings happen (small budget, disorganized cattle call counts as this) friendly and supportive improv. makes a big difference.