MY NAME’S MARK AND I’M AN… ACTOR

When I first started acting, I felt like I did when I first got sober, I was ashamed and embarrassed to say that I was an ac… act… actor. Like the Fonz in Happy Days trying to say he was wr… wr… WRONG. God forbid someone would ask me what I’d been in or why I wasn’t on TV like the other guy that looks just like me. Several years in acting class did not fix it. Doing plays, short films, even a scene in Ocean’s 11 opposite Brad Pitt didn’t fix it either. I still could not help but feel uncomfortable about saying I was an actor. What I’ve come to see now is, I’d been focusing on what I thought it meant to be an actor. I thought, to be able to say you’re an actor, you had to be a “Successful Actor” — meaning someone who made a living from their acting. My mentor, Milton Katselas, didn’t bother with the psychology of the whole  thing when I wanted to quit acting and just direct. He said to me, “You haven’t given the acting thing a hundred percent. What you’re not confronting in your acting will block you as a director. Do twenty scenes for me, I’ll pick them out, and then you decide if you’re done with acting.” (You can read more on this in a previous blog, TO ACT… OR TO DIRECT… THAT WAS THE QUESTION)   He knew that I couldn’t think my way into confidence as an actor, I had to actually push past my shit and build the confidence.