You are always auditioning
If you only think you're auditioning when you're in the room with the casting director, you're missing half of it. You're auditioning when you're checking in with the receptionist, when you're sitting in the waiting area, when you're grabbing a cup of coffee.
In fact, whenever you're in any public space, you're auditioning. You never know who's watching your performance. At the gym? You're being auditioned by your instructor. He knows that the guy sweating away on the next bike has a flat share with an up-and-coming script writer. Walking your dog? That woman with the out-of-control Border Collie is checking you out. She's an associate producer for a major production company. Trying to decide whether to intervene in a worrying altercation on the top deck of the bus? The frightened young bus driver, whose career is about to take a sharp turn upwards, will always remember that day.
This may all sound far-fetched but I can assure you it's not.
My friend Sean Connery had never acted a day in his life until he got discovered lifting weights in a gym by a casting director looking for some slightly more convincing sailors than the usual chorus line for South Pacific. When I was shooting the comedy-heist Gambit with Shirley MacLaine, Universal had just started its famous studio tours, and in those days the tourists were allowed onto the actual sets. Every day a tour bus would pull up, tourists would pile out and the driver would try to convince any actors who hadn't scurried out of sight, like gazelles on a safari, to sign autographs.
One driver was particularly clever at timing his stops. It was annoying, but I also admired his initiative. I knew he had a job to do and my better nature prevailed. I decided to make him look good and, instead of trying to avoid his tour party, I signed every autograph and posed for every picture, and got to know him a little. And who did the bus driver turn out to be? Mike Ovitz, then a student but later the founder, then chairman, of CAA, the world's leading talent agency and one of the most powerful people in Hollywood. And when, working as a doorman at a dodgy hotel in Victoria, I rescued a frightened prostitute from the attentions of a drunk and violent punter (I knocked him out but forgot about his five friends, who proceeded to return the favor), who could have known that the hotel owner's son, Barry Krost, would become a Hollywood agent and a great friend, who would, years later, put together the deal to make Get Carter?
Not an actor? Doesn't matter. Whatever your role is, perform it as though the girl on the checkout, the young woman making your coffee, or, yes, even the guy at the other end of the line trying to fix your computer, is your dream boss, dream date, dream client. It will make you a better person. And sometimes, just sometimes, they really are.
Michael Caine "Blowing The Bloody Doors Off" (2018)
