Who am I, and What's My Type? - Part 2
I’m writing on my new blog every day for thirty days straight. This is the twenty-fifth one. This is the second post in the series where I try to dissect this clumsy idea called an actor’s “type.” Here’s the first. Below’s the second.
I know I’m a very independent guy. I like doing things my way. Like I talked about before, I don’t think I have authority issues - but I have major authority issues. So being an entrepreneur fits me. Being an entrepreneur in an industry where every person who’s lived here long enough to name all the major highways has some sort of acting advice is…entertaining.One of the common pieces of advice is to really embrace your “type.” “Are you the clean-cut lawyer type? The young father? The goofy best friend? Embrace your “type” and focus on getting those kinds of roles.”I personally hate this clumsy idea. Why are some actors given the green light to play vastly different types and others are not? The successful actors have built character versatility through the years. They’ve risked to play types that are farther from themselves and they’ve succeeded through hard work. I also think that actors that start with live theater are used to playing a wider variety of roles – you don’t have a lot of plays with your standard cop, lawyer, bartender types. But why are actors in LA told to forget that and just focus on their type?
There are these things called cognitive biases, which are “human tendencies to acquire and process information by filtering it through own likes, dislikes, and experiences” – thanks Google. For example, a common cognitive bias is the “confirmation bias” - we tend to listen only to information that confirms our preconceptions – one of the many reasons it’s so hard to have an intelligent conversation about climate change. Cognitive biases are terrifying. Anyways, there are several cognitive biases which I think are at play when your average Joe in Los Angeles gives this “type” advice to actors.The “survivorship bias” – an error that comes from focusing only on surviving examples, causing us to misjudge a situation. For instance, we might think that being an entrepreneur is easy because we haven’t heard of all those who failed. When these average Joes that I’m bemoaning achieve some degree of success, they assume their opinions carry more weight than they do. They are a “surviving example.” They focus on their success and then misjudge situations by assuming they have the right way to do something just because they have achieved some degree of success. They don’t even have to be successful actors to give their overconfident advice to other actors. Which leads us to the “overconfidence bias” - some of us are too confident about our abilities, and this causes us to take greater risks in our daily lives. Experts are more prone to this bias than laypeople, since they are more convinced that they are right.Then there’s the “availability heuristic” – people overestimate the importance of information that is available to them. People see the large number of actors that play the same “type” throughout their careers compared to the extremely small number of actors who play a wide variety of roles – then they assume that this presumes that accepting your type is what will lead to success.
At the end of the day, I think people in Los Angeles aren’t used to seeing actors work hard on their craft. And to be the kind of actor that plays a wide variety of roles, you have to work extremely2 hard. My acting teacher would compare playing a very different character like throwing a football with your non-dominant hand - it’s always going to be awkward until you practice enough to make it feel natural. And I know throwing a football with my left hand would take boatloads of practice.Also. There’s a much deeper pool of standard characters that are cast regularly. You have hundreds of TV shows with your standard cop, lawyer, bartender types. There are much fewer big roles which are much harder to land. When you chase those roles that are farther from yourself, you’re essentially putting your money against your odds on favorite type. Why risk $1000 on your 20:1 type when you can put it all on your 1:1 type? Sure the ceiling could is lower with your 1:1 bet, but why risk so much on a 20:1 bet?What’s my reason? Because my currency isn’t the dollar bill, it’s the dream.
Like I said, cognitive biases are terrifying. I know I fall victim to the overconfidence bias. But… I truly believe that I can play an extremely wide variety of roles. I want to be an actor that plays an extremely wide variety of roles. That’s why I became an actor, and I don’t give a damn if I’m biased.So please don’t ask me what my type is, or what actors I’m like, or what actor’s career I’d like for myself. Because I’m not any other actor. I’m Andrew Pish. And everyone else is everyone else. And for Halloween, I’m Sheriff Longmire, thank you very much.
