Your Career Is Not Your Artistry

There is an assumption actors can make once they begin working professionally: if I am working, I must be growing. But a career and an artistic life are not the same thing, and one of the things I found most interesting in my recent conversation with Candace Maxwell on my podcast, Creating Behavior, was hearing a successful working actor

talk about how hungry she still is artistically.

Candace spent five seasons as a series regular on All the Queen's Men, and the way that show was filmed demanded an enormous amount from her craft. An entire season could be shot in roughly three weeks. She would receive the scripts in advance, track her character through the season, and then arrive on set where scenes were block-shot according to location rather than chronology. 

Something from episode one might be followed by something from episode eight. She might get one or two takes. On other occasions, Tyler Perry would rewrite a scene immediately before shooting it and expect the actors to absorb the circumstances, understand the intention, and work. 

There isn't much room in that environment to search for a process once the camera is rolling. You need one already. Otherwise, you are just throwing shit together and hoping it comes off truthful.

Listening, being present, understanding your objective, knowing how to break down a script, tracking where you are emotionally, understanding what has happened to the character and what they know at that particular moment—these are not academic exercises. These are part of the fundamental craft of an actor. 

Once you're working professionally, when you are in the midst of serious pressure, your craft is what will keep you grounded, in the moment, and vivid. Craft and technique become the things you rely on when everything around you is moving quickly. 

Candace described her Meisner training as something that has settled into her over time. She doesn't need to announce the technique to herself anymore. It's simply there when she needs it.

One of the things she said that stayed with me was that a working actor has to learn to do the work and then let it go. As a student, you have the luxury of staying with something. You can rehearse, investigate, fail, go back, try again, and spend time discovering what you don't understand. 

Professional work often demands something else. You prepare as deeply as you can, and when it's time to work, you have to trust that preparation. Then the scene is over, and you move on. 

But being employed does not necessarily keep the artist in you alive. Candace spoke openly about wanting to get back on stage and find a new acting community. She also joined a dance group simply because she wanted to dance again. 

There was no career strategy attached to it. She wasn't trying to book something or build her résumé. She wanted to move, rehearse, be around other creative people, and do something that filled her up. Eventually, she began teaching there, but that wasn't why she started. She needed a creative space that belonged to her rather than to her career.

I think actors need that. I've always encouraged my students to have things in their lives that have nothing to do with acting. Read. Travel. Paint. Cook. Dance. Listen to music. Go to museums. Develop interests that nobody in this business can evaluate, monetize, or take away from you. 

An actor's inner life cannot be fed exclusively by auditions and jobs. If everything creative becomes connected to whether someone is going to pay you or applaud you, something essential can begin to disappear.

Candace and I also talked about the tendency artists have to romanticize suffering. There is a long-standing idea that pain somehow makes us deeper and therefore makes the work deeper. I don't believe that. 

Pain is part of being human, and of course, it can inform an artist, but so can joy. Candace talked beautifully about using joy as creative fuel and about how dance can chemically change her when she walks into a room feeling heavy. That is as legitimate an artistic resource as grief, rage, loneliness, or despair. 

What struck me throughout our conversation was that after five years on a successful television show, she is still looking for ways to grow. She wants to return to the stage. She wants a new challenge. She is curious about producing and directing. She teaches dance. She still cares about listening, script analysis, actor's paraphrase, and the basic craft she learned years ago. 

The professional success hasn't answered the artistic questions for her. If anything, it seems to have made those questions more important.

That is something I wish more actors understood. 

Your career and your artistry will inevitably intersect, but they cannot be allowed to become synonymous. 

A career is concerned with employment, money, representation, visibility, and opportunity. Your artistry is concerned with the continual development of your imagination, curiosity, craft, emotional life, and capacity for human connection. You can be unemployed and growing enormously as an artist. You can also be working constantly and becoming creatively stagnant.

No agent can tend to that part of you. No casting director can. Neither can a series regular, a great paycheck, a fan base, nor the next job. That responsibility remains yours.

Perhaps one of the great challenges of building a career as an actor is that you can spend years fighting to get everything you thought you wanted, only to discover that you still have to protect and nourish the artist who wanted it in the first place. 

If you are feeling distant from your craft, your process, your artistry, I invite you to go to www.returntocraft.com and reconnect to the actor and artist you were when you started out.

Protect Your Life as an Artist

If you are feeling distant from your craft, your process, or the part of yourself that wanted to become an artist in the first place, that is worth paying attention to.

A career cannot nourish that part of you. You have to do that yourself.

For working actors, that may mean private coaching, getting back into a rehearsal room, returning to the stage, or simply finding a creative practice that has nothing to do with getting the next job.

For actors who are still building the foundation of their craft, that work needs to begin with serious training. At the Maggie Flanigan Studio, our Two Year Conservatory is designed to develop that foundation through acting technique and the continued development of the actor’s instrument, with training in areas such as Voice & Speech, Movement, Improvisation, Cold Reading, and Script Analysis.

These are different stages of an actor’s life, but the responsibility is the same. You have to continue tending to the artist.

Your career matters. But it should never become a substitute for your artistry.