"So," I thought, "this is what it's like to be an actor in Malaysia."
Four days ago I got a call. Kitty was resting on the sofa and I hadn't much to do.
"Hello, is this Khai?" said the voice on the other line. I replied with a yes and asked who it was. It turned out to be a director friend of my vocalist who was shooting the second season of a TV series and at the eleventh hour one of the cast members pulled out.
"We need someone to play a real rocker dude," was his description of the role.
I hadn't acted in a while. During the last TV series I was shooting there was a part I wanted to play, that of a cop in a hospital. I told the executive producer that I wanted the role as a cameo for the episodes I was directing.
His reply was, and I quote, "but the character needs to be classically good looking."
"Oh! So you're saying I'm ugly?!"
"No, lah... but this character is going to be flirting with Alia and it has to be believable."
Ok. So not only am I a hideous fucking Chud, I also have no chance with an actress like her. Thanks for the compliment, buddy.
My hopes of acting have pretty much been shot down for roughly the same reasons, and this was an opportunity to act again, which I hadn't done in a long time. Hence, I agreed.
I'd heard talks of the show, and from the information I had gathered I knew it was pretty youth oriented so thought that the role would probably involve me being some emo-rock dude or something - hair to one side covering half the face, dressed in black, etc.
I then arrived on set, got into make-up, and ended up looking like this:
Okay...
My character's name was 'Gajah', and was the equivalent of Silent Bob to the other actor's Jay, silent and in a world of his own, swatting flies with his electric fly swatter. They rolled for a take, I swung up in the air on my cue to swat the fly...
...and broke the fly swatter in half, the top part flying towards the cameraman and boom guy, barely missing them together with the 42" plasma TV.
And so it went. I was to appear in two episodes, and in the second episode I had quite a bit of dialogue, including a moment where I had to sniff one of the other actors for no apparent reason. I had worked with some of the cast members in the last TV series I shot so it was a bit of a reunion. Food was your typical crew food on a local movie set, and I hogged the chicken as usual.
And what did I discover, being on the other side of the lens? Two things:
The first thing I was amused about was how a lot of the more seasoned actors seem to have two modes - the 'daily bread' mode and the 'true actor' mode. I had seen some of these actors in independent productions before, and knew how they could act, be subtle, be good. This was their 'true actor' mode.
That mode was not to be seen on this set.
Instead, you get the 'daily bread' mode - a whole different style of acting, a method that you'd call 'TV acting'. So often people berate the acting style on TV for its over-the-top-ness but here's the truth - if people didn't want them to act that way on these shows, they wouldn't be acting that way, because God knows they can act a whole lot better.
Case in point of this was when we were shooting at Central Market. My character and his 'Jay' are out on the streets, busking. A blind man playing a flute is earning more dough, so my 'Jay' grabs his money. The blind man turns out to be not so blind, gets up and yells blue murder. Everything was, as you'd call it, done in the 'TV acting' stylee.
Whilst we were shooting this scene there were a whole load of on-lookers. One of them was an elderly woman with some groceries who had no idea were shooting and thought that someone really was stealing money from a blind man. She was a regular old woman, probably from a working class background (for want of a better term) and when she realized what it was she stuck around to watch...
...and laughed at the scene every time. She was loving it. It pegged me on to just how different tastes are between different social groups. Though the script seemed so incredibly low-brow to me, that's me. The makcik watching the scene would love every second of the show.
(There can be further argument about this - how non-exposure to things a bit more 'high-brow' or 'intelligent' is unavailable hence its appreciation cannot be nurtured, etcetera etcetera, but let's not get into that know.)
The second thing was not so amusing. In fact, it was downright tiring, and it's given me a new found sympathy for actors.
I discovered the waiting.
The waiting is not fun. Between scenes, between set-ups, you just wait. You could go through your lines, but it's not too hard to remember. My main fluffs were mainly due to Malay not being my first language. Though I can speak it, reading from a script proved to be a bit tricky because a lot of times the words wouldn't roll off of my tongue properly. Just certain words, but if I got stuck on the word, it would fuck me up. Most of the time I'd get the script 5 minutes before I shot the scene.
It's those moments when you're waiting that just outright kills you. It makes you want to be a diva and demand crap because it feels like eternity. You read a book, you take some photos, you go for a walk, but you're still waiting, and sooner or later you have nothing else to do except wait.
The waiting is a killer. Hollywood has trailers. Lucky bastards. We have stools and a makeshift ashtray made from a cut open plastic bottle filled with a bit of water.
So the question remains: would I do more acting? Six hours from now I'll be back behind the lens, shooting the current TV series I'm doing. I love directing, regardless of all my complaints, and I have complaints about acting too, but it's what I started out doing before going behind the lens and I wouldn't mind doing it again.
Only this time I shall bring a portable DVD player.
And maybe some porn.
