Avoid this career mistake, actors.
What They Know Just Might Hurt You.
Let me just speak really plainly, here: The Internet. Never. Forgets. I gotta say, I am so grateful it wasn’t around when I was your age because I made all kinds of questionable choices that I certainly wouldn’t want sticking around to haunt me forever.
You guys have to think things through a bit more.
Now of course there’s the obvious stuff not to post online that I don’t really think I need to get into. You have parents for that. But there’s other kinds of tricky things to take into consideration.
Take this scenario:
You’re a 16 year old with full-on Disney kid potential. You have a face for Disney and tons of talent and you have been working your butt off since you were 12 on your craft, gearing up for all the big opportunities you just knew were ahead.
And then you finally get the audition of your dreams. It’s a starring role for the sweet and perfect, all-American teen in a Disney feature film with Julia Roberts playing your mom and Mark Ruffalo as your dad and they want a fresh and undiscovered face. So you put yourself on tape and it gets you in the room. Then you wow them at your second audition, and then AGAIN at your third. And then you find out you are actually in the top three!
And then you get a very disappointing phone call from an enormously ticked off agent.
Turns out one of the producers found a video you made with your friends two years ago where you are vlogging about a kid you go to school with in a not so nice way.
You might protest, “But it was a joke! It wasn’t even real, we just made it up!”
But it seems real. And somehow it ended up with a few thousand views and you didn’t even realize. And now the producers of this movie have seen another side to you and it isn’t the oh-so-sweet-and-perfect-all-American side you prepared for the role.
So they figure, even though you were their top choice, why risk having that nasty video circulating around giving their very expensive film a questionable reputation? Why not go with one of their other two choices?
Now don’t get me wrong, I definitely don’t want to discourage you from being creative and creating your own content and putting it out there. That’s an important part of being an artist and it can certainly even help your career. But just make sure whatever it is you are okay with it being around forever. You just never know where this stuff is going to end up.
Think it through, guys. I know you will.
