Magyar tales part 3: Casting decisions, showbiz and fairness

Sziasztok guys. One of the challenges of working in showbiz is that you go from project to project all the time - you can go abroad do a TV drama, then you move on to a music video, maybe a bit of modelling for a commercial, then you do a film, maybe some reality TV and then some theatre for a couple a weeks. What this means is that you are constantly working with different people, it is in fact rather rare that your paths can cross again - though it can happen. One of the dancers in Budapest was in fact in a play I did back in 2013 and this project was the first time we had worked together since that play. This can pose a lot of challenges - I cross my fingers, hope for the best and expect the worst when I turn up on a new project like that because you never quite know what kind of people you are going to meet there.

With the Little Princess statue in Budapest

It usually is a mixed bag - there will be a few people you genuinely have a lot in common with and you will naturally find it easier to relate to them on that basis. Then there will be those you have little in common with and you will maintain a polite but formal (if not distant) working relationship with. Then there will be those whom you just can't get along with and genuinely dislike - all you can do is try your best to keep your distance from them and avoid them as much as possible until the end of the project (easier said than done when you have to work with them). Does this sound familiar to my regular readers? It should - because I have talked about my life in the army during NS in very similar terms. Actually, such is the reality of any kind of working life: you have virtually no choice about whom you have to work with and you just try to make the best of the mixed bag of different characters you have to work with. You can't expect to become good friends with everyone, but what do you do about those you really just can't get along with?

Let me tell you about this one guy who really didn't like me. Let's call him Nigel since he has mentioned that he supports the politician Nigel Farage (yup, he is very right-winged). This is what I found out through the grapevine - Nigel thought I was a terrible dancer (and let me be the first to admit it - I've never had a dance lesson in my life before) and that it was a big mistake to have cast me in the ad as a dancer. I found out that four of his friends (whom he had formed a successful dance act with) had auditioned for the ad and that all five of them were originally considered for the ad. However, the creative agency then changed the concept of the ad and after several revisions of the concept, they had new auditions to find new dancers - the five of them were invited to audition again and this time, only Nigel made it through the audition and his four buddies were rejected. Now I don't doubt that Nigel's four buddies are excellent dancers - probably far better dancers than me. That was why he resented my presence there: he was not happy with the fact that an inferior dancer like me had been selected whilst better dancers like his friends were not.

Budapest is an amazing city

During the rehearsals and the shoot, whenever I made a mistake, he would shout at me, like, "Alex, what the hell were you doing there? You messed up again!" It was not the kind of constructive criticism - that would be telling me what I should have done instead so as to avoid making the same mistake again. No, he just went out of his way to hurl abuse. Ironically, whilst my choreographer tried everything she could to motivate and encourage me, Nigel was doing the exact opposite. After a few incidents of that, I had to take him aside and warned him that if he did that one more time, I would make a complaint about his attitude.  He did back off after I told him in no uncertain terms that he was really upsetting me with his behaviour as such. Oh but what made it worse was he tried to become friendly with me by making small talk - and I'm like, good grief, you're so right wing, you're anti-immigrant and anti-EU, you voted for Brexit, it is clear that you and I have absolutely nothing in common. This 'small talk' is painful for the both of us, so why are you even bothering. All I want is for you to shut up and leave me alone, I really don't want to be your friend.

Actually, I didn't even mention my very pro-EU stance on the issue of Brexit - I didn't see the point of antagonizing what was already a very difficult working relationship with Nigel. That would be pouring lemon juice on an open wound. I did think it was very tasteless of him talking about how bad the EU was for the UK in the presence of Hungarians, who are more than happy with being a member of the EU. But you know me, when I witness something like that at work, I just walk away and ignore it - it is not my problem that he is tactless and it is easy to turn a blind eye I suppose. I wanted to explain something to Nigel - but I decided against it because I really didn't want to engage him in any kind of conversation. Yes, I concede that I'm a worse dancer than his four friends - but so what? The casting decision is complex: it is not simply about selecting the best dancers for the job, but it is about finding the right person to match the character the creative agencies. There was one other dancer in this ad who like me, did struggle with the choreography as well. But we're not trying to recreate the Bolshoi ballet here, it is a comedy dance routine and the creative agency must have thought that having someone try very hard to the dance routine but getting it somewhat wrong would look funny. Would Nigel's four friends be better dancers than this other guy? Almost definitely. But would they look as funny as that guy when doing this dance routine? Clearly not. Such is the nature of the creative process.

I kept my opinions to myself whilst in Hungary.

Oh it then comes down to an almost philosophical debate about whether you should have cast an expert dancer who could act as if he was struggling with the dance routine, or if you should genuinely cast someone who isn't a good dancer struggling to do the same routine. You know, I get the same problem when I am asked at an audition to try to do my lines with an Asian or Chinese accent - I would describe my accent as mid-Atlantic: a blend of American and British English with a hint of other European influences. When I try to do a Chinese accent, it often comes across as quite unnatural - like I am trying too hard, it doesn't sound genuine, it sounds quite forced. I usually prefer just to speak Mandarin if I had to portray a Chinese character: but what do you do as a casting director then? If you needed to cast an actor in the role of a person who spoke English with a Chinese accent, do you cast someone who genuinely speaks English as a second/foreign language or do you cast an actor who is good with languages and doing different accents? The former may come across as more authentic of course, but the latter may be more versatile in terms of delivering a good performance. I suppose it then depends on what is more important to the director - is the role a complex one? What else do you require of the actor apart from speaking English with a Chinese accent? As you can see, the casting process is hardly a straightforward one. There are so many factors to consider.

Nigel did ask me, "if you know you are not a trained dancer, why did you even audition for the part then, knowing that you would struggle picking up choreography?" It is a complex question. Now firstly, as an actor, I go for loads of auditions all the time - my agent gets me those auditions and at that stage, neither I nor my agent knew how much choreography was involved or how difficult it was going to be. The choreographer herself probably didn't know either - much of the rehearsal process was creating certain dance pieces for the director to see if he liked it. The director would then say, "I like this, I don't like that, I could use a part of that sequence, but only the beginning. I don't like that sequence at all. I have a few other ideas I would like you to try etc." By that token, such creative projects are always moving goalposts. Indeed, having done so many ads over the years, this was nothing new. In an ad I did for an alcoholic drink years ago, I rehearsed a big dance number with a group of dancers and gymnasts: we shot the entire sequence (which I thought looked pretty amazing) and when I finally saw the ad, goodness me, that entire dance sequence had hit the cutting room floor. The fact is, the full length version of the ad was already at 90 seconds and they had so much footage, enough for a 90 minute movie in fact - something had to go and so our routine was cut.

So by that token, I went for the audition and it was pretty much a case of letting the decision makers decide if I was the right kind of performer they needed for the ad. It was not some kind of straight forward process for them to audition all these people and then award the best twenty dancers with a part in the ad. I remember when I was in primary school, there was a prize presentation at the end of the academic year whereby the top 20 students in each year were awarded prizes in a special ceremony. Now it was a pretty straight forward process: a teacher merely added up all the scores of the four subjects (English, maths, science & second language) so you have a maximum score of 400. Perhaps I didn't do the best audition and if it had been graded as some kind of dance exam, then I would most certainly not have finished in the top 20. Not by a long way. Thus by that token, perhaps that's why Nigel resented my presence, that somehow I didn't deserve it. After all, we were doing the same job in Hungary, being paid the same amount of money on the same contract. Perhaps it wasn't anything personal at all, he merely resented the unfairness of the situation - that's all. But then again, the whole industry is never totally fair - casting decisions are never transparent and it is hard to understand why or how they choose on actor over another. It is so subjective and the decision makers are not obliged to explain themselves to the actors. But how is that any different from when gatekeepers eventually hire one candidate over another when you find a job in any other industry? But even if he wasn't happy with the situation, he should have been professional enough not to have vented his frustration on me.

But then again, I think about the situation in Singapore where so many Singaporeans are very vexed with the increased amount of competition from foreigners. I suppose there is a part of me that can relate to that kind of frustration - after all, dancers like Nigel have trained hard for many years to hopefully one day be able to get well-paid work as a professional dancer. Then a joker like me shows up and declares that I have never ever taken a dance class in my life before, yet I somehow managed to get the same job, on the same contract for the same amount of money. It's not like I've only had a small amount of dance training - no, I've never ever actually paid for a single dance lesson in my life, ever. The closest I've gotten to learning dance choreography was following a few K-pop dance tutorial videos so I can do the dance to my favourite K-pop songs (notably, by T-ara). Is Nigel therefore justified to feel at least somewhat irked by the situation then? I suppose so! Just try to put yourself in his shoes for a moment and imagine. But then again, here's a list of ten famous actors who never took an acting course. Like me, they somehow managed to get themselves well paid work the same way others who have invested a lot of time and money in training. Such is the nature of the industry - as the saying goes, don't hate the player, hate the game. And that's showbiz.

There are many things about life that are unfair... whose fault is it?

So there you go. That's my brush with 'Nigel' - to be fair, there was a certain amount of 'banter' going on amongst the dancers. Some of which were in good nature, others were not. But when it was not directed at me personally, I usually just mind my own business. I guess at some point, you have to realize that you have to take care of yourself and fight your own battles - this is not a primary school and there's no teacher to run to when somebody does or say something to upset you. The fact is I was never going to be Nigel's friend anyway: apart from being poles apart when it came to our political views, there was really hardly anything else we had in common. Ironically, one morning after the shoot, when a group of us were at breakfast at the hotel, some of the others started talking about Nigel (he wasn't at the breakfast) and some of them said some pretty nasty things about him as well. It seems he has managed to offend quite a number of people amongst the cast and the crew - it would be against my nature to repeat some of the things that were said about Nigel here on my blog; but oh boy, I didn't say anything. I just ate my breakfast there with a smile on my face, filled with a warm sense of Schadenfreude. Oh my orange juice tasted sweeter and I felt so much better.

That's it from me on part 3 of my Magyar tales. In part 4, I shall talk about some of the more complex and unusual working relationships I have encountered with other people whilst in Hungary. Thanks for reading, köszönöm szépen!