"A Man Of Many Roles"

Yesterday my agent called me,
"Goddammit, they want you to read for Beth Cooper again. You read for them on Friday, right?"
"Yeah," (wrong, I read for them on Wednesday.)
"For Paul Bergie?"
"No, I read for Dustin on Wednesday."
"Oh ... OK. I'll give her a call and call you back."
Alright.

So I'm thinking he'll call back in like, five minutes. This totally put me on edge for the rest of the night, as I wonder if he called the wrong guy, or if he didn't what this fourth character will be about. About five agonizing hours later, I see that I missed his call (had my phone on vibrate 'cuz I was having a text message conversation while at dinner, and keeping it on loud would be the height of rudeness.) For some reason my phone wasn't connecting to the network, so I had to call my voicemail from the phone of the persons house I was at. I could hardly hear the message from that phone, so I called again from mine and heard:
"So we got it figured out, I was just playing tennis, that's why I'm getting back to you now (I didn't mind waiting, nope, not at all). So you've got an audition at 6:10 for Paul Bergie, it's a producer-director session. It's a one-liner, so I'll get to the office early tomorrow to send it to you ... you shouldn't need too many hours to work on it."

So I've gone from lead character, to incidental character, to lead character's buddy, to one line in a flashback. But hey, a gig's a gig, and I'm in no position to complain about getting anything. I mean, after this audition I'll have auditioned in front of Columbus three times, so that's pretty dang cool.

So today I got everything together to be out of the house at 1 o'clock because we were having the carpet in the apartment cleaned. We stuck around until the guy was finished, which was around 2:30 or so, and headed to Metrotown in Burnaby to kill some time while we waited for the carpet to dry. I called my agent while I was there,
"You've been in their room four times, I asked them why couldn't they just give it to you (at least I wasn't the only one thinking this), but they had to see the guys there for a callback."
I only spent about 45 minutes there at Metrotown before I had to hop the SkyTrain to get to the SeaBus to grab the bus to get to the studio's "side entrance". I enter the waiting room to see the usual crew of handsome-lookin' dudes, and I instantly become dismayed when I a guy I know as a VFS grad was there for the same part. Looks like my dream will never be realized where I walk into a completely empty waiting room where the Casting Assistant comes out to tell me that no one else showed-up, so they'll just give to me. Oh, and here's the keys to a new BMW, it's just taking-up space on the lot, you might as well have it, just mind the briefcase full of money in the trunk, I guess you can have that too.

Columbus and Radcliffe enter, late, and the actors start pourin' in. I get my turn, and right away Chris says "You're back!"
"That's right," I say.
"You are a man of many roles" (how 'bout you just give me one aready!)
"Well, that's the actor's way." Wasn't even sure what I meant by that, but I hoped it made me sound like a professional go-getter.

I read my ... line, and Chris said that the read was good, but he wanted me to take a bit more time with it. So there, now he's directed me, cool. As I was leaving the room the Casting Assistant asked me if I can read for "Loser Clerk". "I already did," I said, so this thing just turned into a "Loser Clerk" callback. The guy who auditioned for "Paul Bergie" after me was also asked to read for our favourite convenience store employee. There were some other guys in the room being called back for him too ... but no Jason. Take that, times two! I read "Loser Clerk", and held the last moment of the audition as I was leaving, just to have some fun with it, show them I'm in good spirits, and a blast to have on set, I mean, I'm just a riot.

When I got home, I received feedback from the general audition I did last week (the one I was lat-- I mean, right on time for.) The e-mail read "pretty good comic timing, great character look."

I'm the guy who puts the word "character" in "actor". Wait, that doesn't make any sense. I mean, I'm the guy who ADDS the word "char" to "actor" to make "character". Yeah, that's a lot better.