Who Do I Think I Am!?

Or how to pre-emptively cut myself out of a lucrative Celebrity Hardback deal by giving it up for free

So the first post I made here did considerably better than I was expecting with a clutch of people choosing to subscribe on the basis of a silly little manifesto. Cheers to you!

According to the metrics, the vast bulk of you arrived here from other social media platforms with a smaller handful from shares or just simple curiosity so it strikes me that there’s a largely unasked question that threatens to destabilise the whole concept of Large Actor right out the gate:

Just Who On Earth Do I Think I Am?

And it’s a good question. I don’t know how you found this Substack or how familiar you are with my body, of work or otherwise. To that end I thought I would do a quick biography of my early life and career so if you don’t know me at all you can be assured that I least know what I’m on about when it comes to acting, if you know me mainly from Bad Education or After Life you can fill in the gaps and if you know everything already and are my super fan it might just be fun to read anyway instead of having to hear me dribble on about it for two hours on a podcast. Who has the time? I suppose you could look at my Wikipedia but I know myself from having read it that it comes off extremely dry and also not all of it is correct.

So here we go. Who am I? I’ll bloody well tell you mate.

The Bit Before The Professional Acting Bit

So we’ll just speed through the first 19 years of my life because I need to save something for the Celebrity Hardback.

Even as a baby I was making big calls

I emerged on the 28th of September 1992 by caesarean after stubbornly refusing to be born. This stubbornness would be a feature throughout the rest of my life.

My mother was/is a voracious reader and I inherited that from her. In terms of primary school productions, that made me nature’s narrator. Reading the plot from a music stand in the school hall while the beautiful and effervescent stars of the show did their thing (honestly Tolleshunt D’arcy Primary School was like the Rodeo Drive of the Greater Dengie Area) didn’t really ignite my acting passion although it did give me a lifelong fascination with talking at people until they die of boredom.

Given my love of books I told my mother (now fully recovered from the catastrophic trauma of giving birth to me) that my intention was to become an author. She, wise lady that she is, told me to temper my dreams and remember that I would need a real job until I could make a living off the written word.

At the beginning of secondary school (PLUME MASSIVE WHAT’S UP!!!!!!!!!!) drama was a subject that was actually on the curriculum. Oh man. It was like fireworks going off in my head. I became OBSESSED. I immediately joined the after school club and handily nailed my first audition landing the role of “Gustav The Scientist” in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. What do you mean you’ve never heard of that character? Maybe you should EDUCATE yourself a bit. Anyway I accidently eat a bit of the apple at the end and had to drop dead. In a stalwart acting decision that’s still talked of in Maldon as “a bit much” and “milking it”, I made that shit last upwards of 30 seconds. Hammy? Yes. But it got a laugh. A laugh! Oh, sweet Ambrosia! You can sum up the rest of my life as chasing that high again. That lightning bolt that struck the Plume School (WHASUUUUUUUUUUUUP) in 2004. Or thereabouts.

From there, every spare moment was dedicated to acting. I went in for every school show. I joined a local amateur theatre company (Essex Group Represent (shout out to Gary and Ann Sullivan)) and gave up all weekends and most school nights to be in as many shows as I could. I was so fucking hungry. I took singing lessons for a while just to add another string to my bow (shout out to Nova Hughes). I hoovered up any opportunity to perform. I’ve done musicals, Shakespeare, comedies, dramas, dramadies, extremely sincere experimental GCSE theatre with a powerful message, you name it.

I was going to be an actor and nothing was going to stop me. I told my mum as much. She’s so wise. She told me to temper my dreams and reminded me that I would need a real job until I could make a living titting around in dress up.

A Brief Pause

It’s worth noting here that while I was extremely fortunate that I had the free time and relative economic safety to do as much acting as I did (my mother’s petrol costs ferrying me around every provincial theatre in Essex must have been ridiculous. Sorry mum) there is no trace of the bard in my family. I come from fairly modest stock (my maternal side was London East End right up until fairly close to my awful birth) and I had no nepotistic route into acting. It may seem weird to make a big deal of this but as this Substack develops I do want to get into how one “breaks in” to the industry and how the circumstances of birth can create enormous disparity between who gets to have a career or not. I am lucky beyond compare. I benefitted from, and I hate to put it so bluntly, being a comfortable white boy with a southern accent. I know that’s a contributing factor to my career. But I also don’t want to diminish myself either. It took me a long time to reach a place where I was comfortable saying “You know what? I’m fucking great at acting”. I didn’t get a leg up into the professional world and I’ve made my living without any formal training. Every part I’ve gotten I’ve worked for and earned. It’s important for one to remember that, especially in a job market that can be so arbitrarily cruel to the people that love it.

Anyway, here’s how I became a professional actor entirely by accident because I’m a jammy git.

How I Became a Professional Actor Entirely By Accident Because I’m a Jammy Git

2011 I start my degree in Drama and Creative Writing at Royall Holloway University of London (#HomeOfTheBears!!!!!!!!). By my second term I’ve landed my first professional television role. I work fast.

Some background: The Essex Group had set up a small agency in order to get some of us on the casting website Spotlight. This agency had already begun to fold by the time I started Uni, but my casting fossil remained. I was sought out to audition for a new sitcom for BBC3 that was perilously close to shooting without an actor in place for one of the key roles. I auditioned well and they decided to take a punt on a complete randomer. This is where some of you may have first become aware of me. The show was Bad Education. My character was Joe Poulter.

Nailing my first professional press shoot.

That six week shoot was one of the scariest and most exhilarating times of my life. I had never acted for camera before and was essentially learning on the go. Once it was all over I was back at university and studying. As one does, I thought about how much I had enjoyed it and how lucky I was to have had that opportunity but also safe in the knowledge that something like that would almost certainly never happen again.

Then we got a second series.

Representation and the First Wave

Once we had wrapped on series 2 I was talking with a nice man called Marcus (shout out to Marcus). He was a friend of Jack Whitehall’s and had once worked at DAA under the aegis of Michael Ford (shout out to Michael). I was in need of professional representation as the end of university drew near and a meeting was set up. DAA no longer exists but I am still represented by Michael now at Hatch. Happy ten years!

From there, events started to rapidly snowball. In the time that it took me to complete my 3rd year I had played Ryan in Trying again for Sky Living, Webby in Rude Boys for BBC Comedy Feeds and now a series 3 for Bad Education with talk of a film on the way. I left Royal Holloway with a 2:1 and a mountain of debt I still haven’t fully paid back. Thanks Tonty Blair.

The next four or so years are basically a list of various jobs that I was getting at a pretty steady clip, never making enough money to be comfortable but enough to live on and keep trying. I did everything from comedy pilots and short run sitcoms like Flat TV to American backed films like How to Talk To Girls at Parties and even that advert for a French mattress company I mentioned in my pervious article which you can read here:

And in fact, while we’re at it, why not subscribe if you haven’t already so you never miss an article!?

Anyway, after wowing audiences as Buttons in the 2017 Poole Pantomime of Cinderella and aside from picking up an extremely small role in a Netflix series (this almost certainly won’t become important later so feel free to immediately forget this the second after you read it), 2018 was where the wheels came off.

The Wilderness Year: Pizza Delivery and Becoming Dog Meat

I have always struggled with self esteem as difficult as that may be to believe after this self congratulatory diatribe. For the longest time it felt like there was one of the Agents from The Matrix standing behind me, with his earpiece, ready to tap me on the shoulder and say “alright pal, you’ve had your fun”. This can probably be attributed to a number of things, chief among which being the relative insecurity of the career that I chose, my lack of any skills that would be necessary to change career should I need to and the general sense that without any training or rich parents to fall back on, if I slipped off the tightrope I’d be hitting the ground hard.

My run of poor form from the back half of 2017 through the first half of 2018 wasn’t anyone’s fault. I was still doing my best in every single audition and my management were satisfied I wasn’t phoning it in but I couldn’t get anything to stick. This is an enormous problem in my profession. Once you lose that momentum, not only do you have no money coming in it also becomes exponentially harder to secure work as you drop out of collective memory. Eventually I had to face facts: for the time being at least, mum was right and I would need to get a real job to fund my titting about habit and also pay rent and stuff.

Pizza delivery seemed like a good option given that I could work nights and still keep my days free for auditions. However, as the days turned to weeks turned to months I was picking up every shift I could with an eye on that area manager position. My acting career was dead and I couldn’t spend the rest of my life driving around my little corner of Essex slinging slice and nearly being killed and eaten by a pair of Rottweilers. I’ve made it sound like the Rottweiler thing happened a lot. It was once. Pretty bad though and the people who functionally released the hounds on me can go to hell forever. Also, a message to anyone who lacks personality to the extent that you name your house something twee like “Dingle-Flumps” or “The Lady Garden” instead of having a house number: delivery personnel hate you and we call you names behind your back. Also you never tip. Fuck off.

Nearly a full year had passed before a lifeline was thrown to me. Remember in the paragraph before this section started I mentioned a small part in a Netflix show? Well you shouldn’t, because I told you to forget it. But if you have remembered… well done. That was a test. You should remember everything I say. There’s a quiz at the end of all this

Anyway, it was After Life and they wanted me back for series 2. No longer would I be Recorder Kid. No no. I’m fricking James, son.

Low angle. Bad Coat

Redemption

I turned in my badge, hat and bumbag at the pizza chain and went off to shoot After Life. It remains, to date, the biggest television show I’ve ever worked on. In an instant my fortunes had turned around. I had the wind at my back and a rocket up my anus. Nothing was going to stop me now!

The Novel Coronavirus

Well shit.

Unprecedented Times

Like the entirety of the industry I was out for nine months as Covid-19 swept the world. I had been fortunate enough to be able to afford a microphone as well as securing a Voiceover agent (shout out to Laura) so I hunkered down and survived off of radio adverts, dubbing work and my little government stimmy. When productions started to open up again though, things were different. I received my first ever offer only role as Ray in Murder They Hope (offer only being a situation where the production comes to you directly instead of requiring an audition process). After Life 3 was a lock in. I had successfully auditioned for Horrible Histories just days before lockdown started and they were now ready to film. I received my second offer only for Magic Bloody Mike of all things! After 10 hard years of plugging away, taking twice as many losses as victories, I finally felt like I had made it. I was a safe pair of hands. I was a working actor. Then there was a cost of living crisis and a Hollywood strike but you can’t have everything can you? All that fine work didn’t go to waste though. Horrible Histories continues to release. At time of writing, three episodes from the new series are available on the BBC iPlayer. In addition, we are fairly close to the release of Boat Story, my first ever TV drama. More news as we get it!

Which Brings Us Up To Now

That’s my life and career. This whole exercise was to act as a primer for my general perspective on things as I move forward with this Substack. Whatever you read here, whether you agree or disagree, enjoy it or find it intolerable, you now know the type of person it’s coming from. I speak as someone with a near lifelong obsession with acting who has been lucky enough to call it a career these past 12 years. I speak, specifically, as a Large Actor. A Comedy Man. This is my expertise. I hope you find it interesting/useful.

Between this and the previous article I think that’s general admin business done which means we can get into the real meat of why I created this in the first place: going deep on the realities of working life as an actor and musings on the industry itself. Thank you so much for reading this and thank you especially if you subscribed so this arrived in your inbox straight away. It genuinely means the world.

So this last bit is basically a call to arms. Please subscribe if you haven’t so you never miss an article. Nothing will ever EVER be paywalled so please pick the free option unless you’re desperate to give me money.

Please share this article and the page itself to anyone who might be interested. It’s becoming increasingly harder to market anything on the internet so your help is very much appreciated.

Moving forward I would love to use questions in the comments as jumping off points for discussion. I already have one chambered but please do leave any burning questions down below because content is life and you are my agricultural traditions.

And that’s about that! Thank you once again for reading. Like, subscribe, ring the bell etc etc.

I’m Ethan Lawrence: Large Actor. What do you wanna know?