Grimm and Bare It - Getting on to "Grimm," part 2

I was absolutely convinced I would not get this role. The character description read: “rotund but well-built man … reminiscent of the IRA … been through the wars, been in many fights, and should look like it.” But of course, I thought wryly; anybody would think of me when you read that!

As my friends and family know (as well as faithful readers of this blog, assuming there are any), I was laid off from my last day job pretty much without warning on July 17, 2009. That forced me into the long process of becoming a full-time free-lance writer and actor … a process that has been up and down, and continues to be filled with uncertainty, but has been mostly a happy one. I posted a summary of part of that process -- at least with regard to auditions, simplifying our life, and finding an ongoing free-lance writing job that has helped me make ends meet while keeping my daily schedule flexible -- last September.

There were other landmarks along the way. I did my first TV extra work, on the TNT series Leverage, on August 17, 2009, for “The Future Job”; and on August 30-31, 2009 for the final show of the second season, “The Maltese Falcon Job.” I signed with Ryan Artists, a talent agency, on August 27, 2009, although they promoted me initially as a “lifestyle model” (read: older, for Baby Boomer goodies and services). They said they could not be sure whether my stage experience would make the transition to film and video.

On November 25, 2009, I got cast in my first indie feature, which would shoot January-June 2010 and become known as “Coup de Cinema.” It took nearly a year for me to land my first commercial job through my agent: a Web ad for AutoDesk we shot on August 14, 2010, released online about six weeks later. Two more commercial jobs followed within less than a month. I was off and running.

Over the past two years I’ve also acted in several pilots for potential Web or TV series, and some instructional films. I appeared in a local car ad, read characters in two new scripts on local cable access TV, shot a second AutoDesk Web ad and a Microsoft/Fiserve spot for bank software (my scene got cut but I got a copy of the footage), and did extra work in Web ads for Verizon and BlackBerry. (I have a nice short scene in the former, but it’s mostly just the back of my head, below and to the left of the star of the ad, for BlackBerry.)

I played a snooty, skeptical investor for a mockumentary in a scene shot at the Back Stage Bar in March 2011 and another one as a long-haired slacker sound engineer at a rock concert for the same project a year later. (You can find both scenes in this compilation pitch video -- the first at about 3 minutes and the second starting about 11 minutes.) I even managed to do a few more stage shows: sumptuous and talent-laden productions of “The King and I” with Broadway Rose Theatre Company in Tigard in the summer of 2010, “Annie Get Your Gun” with Lakewood Theatre Company in Lake Oswego in the fall of 2011, and “City of Angels” at Lakewood right now. I could describe lots of other funky projects, but let’s move on to the story at hand.

Grimm would be the first major network show (NBC) to do all its shooting in Portland in many years. Under Suspicion (1994-1995), a CBS series about a female homicide detective played by the ever-intriguing Karen Sillas, aired in 1994-95. Nowhere Man, a science fiction mystery thriller about a man whose identity seemed to have been instantly wiped out, starred Bruce Greenwood and appeared on UPN in 1995-96. Both series showed promise and received critical praise, but both were cancelled after a single season.

Advance word from our agents via the local casting agency was that the makers of Grimm had plenty of money to spend and would not hesitate to bring guest actors up from LA. So we needed to bring our very best game to the auditions: memorize the lines and deliver them well. The pressure was on to show the new production company in town what the creators of Leverage had already learned: that Portland has plenty of talent and producers needn’t devote so much of their budgets to flying actors up from southern Cal.

When you start acting for film and video, you become more conscious of your body. I don’t mean in the adolescent way, where you’re constantly worrying about how you look and peering into mirrors and windows to check. You do need to accept that most casting occurs within the first 3 seconds that people get a look at you; you have a “look” that either does or does not approximate what they want, and after that all they need to know is whether you can deliver a line clearly and respond to direction. What I mean is, you become more aware of the details of your physical presence and how they might affect your career. You learn to take better care of them, and tailor each item toward a particular audition or job as much as you can. It’s an attention-to-details sort of thing -- you take care of business and move on -- not a source of obsession.

I’ll be more specific. When I was a younger man, I tended to let my fingernails and hair grow between each cutting. I might leave them untouched for six, eight, ten, or more weeks at a time, and my hair and nails grew fast. I only cut my nails when they became so long that they posed a hindrance to my dexterity. And without thinking about it, I habitually cut my nails pretty much down to the quick. My hair might completely cover my neck and ears before I cut it back two or three inches.

In the past decade, the example and counsel of my wife moderated these habits. As I became a professional actor over the past few years, I’ve altered my approach even more, in the interests of my work: I cut my nails and hair more often and not so dramatically, because I might have to dash to an audition on a couple hour’s notice, or first thing in the morning, and will not have time to trim a shaggy head. Sometimes a particular potential job guides my decisions. Blessed with an early salt-and-pepper mane (it came on in my mid 30s), I’ve had my hair dyed back to something resembling its original black three times, either to land a particular stage role or to portray a character even more realistically after I’d been cast.

In my daily life, I wear spectacles most of the time, but that won’t do for most acting roles -- especially in front of video cameras where anything but specially-treated glasses will catch and reflect artificial lighting in a distracting manner. Growing steadily more nearsighted over the years, I started to find it difficult to read new scripts at auditions without juggling various pairs of glasses. To avoid that distraction, I got fitted for bifocal contacts that enabled me to see near and far, and therefore audition without resorting to any spectacles.

But how could I embody “rotund but well-built” for Grimm? A character who had “been through the wars” and “many fights”? My 5-foot-9-inch frame, which usually carries about 167 pounds, and my earnest, articulate vocal style tend to lend themselves to the portrayal of trust figures and intellectuals: doctors, lawyers, and professors. On stage I could get away with Macduff, a 19th-century British military engineer, a Mayan shaman, or Chief Sitting Bull, but if a camera moved in close? Not a chance.

Moreover, the script said the lines, though printed in English, would be delivered “in French, with subtitles,” by a character in a bar in Mannheim, Germany! What was up with that? Since I can speak French, maybe that was the main reason my name popped up as possible talent for this role. Well, I wasn’t going to land the role anyway, so what did it matter?

I had more fluent friends translate the lines into French so I’d have them in my back pocket. For my audition, I dressed in an oversized khaki shirt and rolled up the sleeves above my elbows to make my upper arms seem bigger than they are, and donned tight black jeans with a fat belt. I also didn’t comb my hair into a sleek coif, but left it a little snarled and arranged some strands to hang loose around either side of my forehead.

Finally, I put as much gravelly bass in my voice as I could while remaining intelligible. That’s about all I could think of to do to try to become a badass for Grimm.