This post was written in March 2023.
I graduated this week. As with every other time I ever graduated from something, graduation brought with it excitement and pride, but also grief and fear. Looking back at the last six months, I am ridiculously proud of myself. The conservatory was a challenge which helped me grow as an actor and a person. I understand myself and my abilities more, and also got the best introduction to Toronto and its film industry that an actor could hope for. I also left my entire life back in Calgary, and built a new one here in Toronto. Yeah, I overcame some unexpected challenges: I’ve lived in three places since arriving in Toronto, I had some health issues, homesickness was way worse than I ever expected it to be, and I had imposter syndrome that hit as hard as the astroid that killed the dinosaurs.
This last week has been one of the busiest—if not THE busiest—I’ve had since the program started. It started with meeting a casting director on Sunday to discuss a tape I’d sent, and that was followed with taping an audition, after which I prepared for another audition which I did over Zoom Monday morning. I don’t remember what else I did on Monday, but I’m sure whatever I did was impressive. On Tuesday we had an all-day stunt workshop. I haven’t done stunts since November and let me tell you, by the end of that class I really wish I’d kept it up. Mostly because it’s just so much fun, but partly because I was so sore. In the evening I got to see the rough cut of my Close Up—a short film I wrote and acted in as my final project. I also found out that my electricity was out, and spent some time unsuccessfully trying to get it fixed. It’s still out as I type this, with the exception of a single outlet.
Wednesday morning, I dove into editing. Around lunch, we had a workshop in public relations which made me think of the complexities and trials of fame, and immediately after that I was off to do even more edits until basically bedtime. I also found out my schedule for the next day, and did not get much sleep. Early Thursday morning was more editing, then I had to do my makeup in the car on the ride across town before arriving at school for a bunch of different things, including an interview and media training—in that order—eventually ending with a surprise-graduation-award-ceremony-party. After that, us actors had a grad dinner together, then a little afterparty, and I thought about how lucky I was to know these incredible and talented people, much less be counted among them. I returned home at around 3am, 19 hours after I’d left.
Friday morning, I let myself sleep in a bit, then was immediately off to work on the final cut of my Close Up. After that, I had a monologue to memorize for a workshop I was doing over the weekend (and three scripts to read and three movies to watch, but I didn’t get around to those. Don’t tell anyone.) which I worked on in a coffee shop before meeting friends for a showing of short live-action Oscar-nominated films. When we got out of the theatre, Toronto was in the middle of an incredible lightning-thunder-snowstorm, so I hiked home to my under-electricked sublet and worked on my monologue a bit more. Then I watched old Skipper videos to soothe the homesickness until my phone battery died and wrote this blog post in an attempt to remember this incredible week for the future, but I’m out of practice writing blog posts so everything thus far has probably been pretty boring to read about.
When I got the acceptance email for the Actors’ Conservatory at the Canadian Film Centre back in July 2022, I knew my life was about to change, and that fact was both exciting and terrifying. Exciting because I had been wanting to leave Calgary and pursue acting for YEARS. In fact, way back in 2017, I’d made a trip to Toronto in the hopes of finding an agent and being told I could make it as an actor, and I even wrote a blog post about it at the time. Terrifying because I was leaving everything behind, even Skipper, with no guarantees it would be worth it.
I still don’t know if it was worth it.
Precarious Writer 