Chasing the American dream

Published Friday 16 May 2008 at 16:00 by Jake Thornton

Los Angeles, for an actor, is like nowhere on earth. The best way to describe it is that it feels like it’s built on an earthquake. At any moment anything could happen - an earthquake, a tsunami, a forest fire, or even getting cast in a film or TV show.

I moved here because of the complete lack of work in TV and film I was getting in the UK. I’m an actor and as such I want to explore my craft through all available media. I’ve been fortunate in that I’ve done some great theatre work in the UK, but out of the five years since I’d graduated from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, always with a hard-working agent behind me, I’d had perhaps 15 auditions for TV and not a single audition for a film. That’s an average of three a year. American actors’ jaws drop when I tell them that statistic. Now I frequently have three TV auditions a week and have just booked the lead role in a film. The work seems to be here, and it’s here in abundance.

But here’s the thing - in the States, I’m marketable as being something special, something not found every day. Back home, I was another young male actor, almost identical to the multitude pumped out by the drama training system in the UK, not to mention the hordes who decide not to train at all.

Here I represent something somewhat special, although ironically my drama training seems to mean nothing to casting directors unless I add that I trained at the same school as Ewan McGregor, Orlando Bloom and Daniel Craig.

But although my drama training means nothing to them, it means something to me. My excellent training at Guildhall, as well as specialised classes in the Meisner technique at the brilliant Actors Temple in London, have given me the tools I now need to book jobs over here and really utilise my full talent. I’m not merely a good-looking guy who got off a Greyhound bus from Kentucky. I have something of substance behind me. And it serves me well.

It’s now a well-documented fact that in 2007, every American television pilot produced by the major networks here had at least one British actor among its cast. And in many cases, they were playing American characters. Somehow the British actor is deemed a commodity by the industry here. Somehow we are ‘proper’ actors, and I am here to fully take advantage of that.

And so here I am, living and experiencing the American dream. Not with delusions of grandeur, not for A-list celebrity status, but to work simply as an actor in all available media. Here it is a profession and one that is respected and deemed plausible. I’m sure I’ll return one day, but for now I’m happy to stay where the work is.