Fleshed-Out Characters

It's student film season. Backstage and Casting Networks are brimming with roles in films for NYFA, SVA, and NYU students.

I have my usual gripes. Broken single mothers, girlfriend to protagonist. Women are so frequently lead-adjacent. Women can be people and have characteristics of their own! However many first projects are just loving imitations of existing culture, and female characters are still having a difficult time at the box-office (action figures of Rey, anyone?). Students have yet to hear of the Bechdel test. Fine.

Ah yes, here we are. Stripper.  I would like to sit down each of these students and ask them how many strippers they know, and what they based the characters on. Are all of them really parroting what they learned from watching The Wire, and Law and Order: SVU?

I am not a sex worker. I have had friends who are. I do not think I can speak authentically to their varied experiences. Am I supposed to believe that every 19-year-old student can?

Devil's advocate: maybe the student has never run a company, organized a heist, or had a serious relationship, and we make movies about those things all the time. I say to you this may not be entirely different, but it is the least grounded, the least three-dimensional, the most repetitive trope.

I, as an adult female actor, have so few roles available to me. An alarming number of the roles in my inbox  sadly read Broken Sex Object. A stripper with a heart of gold who is conflicted about leaving her lifestyle for the One Man who can take her away from All Of This.

Dear students: please write something else. Maybe you haven't had your heart properly broken yet, you are afraid to write romance. Maybe you don't have the budget for car chases and explosions.

You are capable of so much more. Write me a role that's not a stripper. Try.

I think I'm officially Nocturnal

Between Seattle jet-lag, two dolls shows in a row, an overnight shoot on friday, and a midnight promo last night, I haven't seen 7am in some time now.

Nighthawks went very well.I had never seen a crew so large for a student film. Everyone was upbeat, despite the late hour and cold. Over the course of the evening we had 911 called on us, drunks and junkies try to come in thinking we were open, film mags jam, but I was very pleased with how things went.

Today I have an audition for Shakespeare Now, for which, honestly, I could have been better prepared. My best hope for a role is Helena in Midsummer, as I am towering maypole-size.

Tonight I'm shooting That Late Thursday Night in Fitchburg. The script is simple, and I think does a very good job of showing some relationship collateral damage.

Last but not least, I just put a video up on Youtube for a Sarah Lawrence friend. His most recent film was screened at a horror festival in New York. The character I read for was originally male, but if he likes my read we can work it out.