Paddle Your Own Canoe: One Man's Fundamentals for Delicious Living

by Nick Offerman

  Marla tried to calm my ire and explain that these things take time and that eventually people would see that I was more than a plumber, but I was not to be mollycoddled by Marla. I was so bent on vindication that I had a headshot taken with a huge foam-latex cock (from the Defiant production Big Mother) in my hands and sent it to everybody in town. An audacious statement of defiance the meaning of which no one had any fucking idea. A lot of them thought I was trying to be funny, which I suppose was also what I was trying to do, to an extent.

  I did much better in the theater than anywhere else. After a couple of years I became better at acting, reaching the level of “intermediate,” and I started getting film roles, which was exciting because there weren’t that many films coming through Chicago, maybe four or five a year. I quickly learned that any kind of pandering was the wrong idea, but that it was important to simply be myself through the whole casting process. If I just presented myself as sincerely as possible, that was the best way to have a chance of getting hired. And, by god, it seemed to work.

  Nineteen times out of twenty they’re just not looking for you, and you have to learn to not take it personally. If the people are nice and you’re prepared, then you can tell when they think you’re good and you can also tell when they think you’re not good. There’s a certain level of trial and error to auditioning, and you must simply try to continue to learn to behave in the way you did when they made you feel that they thought you were good. You also learn what mannerisms turn off a room and then try to subsequently avoid those behaviors. Insincerity, especially “chipper” insincerity, will close down a room faster than ripping a crisp fart, the discharge of which will also, I can assure you, take some of the air out of your credibility. Save it for church.

  By the time I left Chicago I was depending upon a few casting directors who were putting more and more faith in me, and having me come in for increasingly great stuff, swinging for the fences. Sure, I struck out most of the time, but that’s how it goes. They were hoping, along with me, that I would get lucky and connect with one of the pitches thrown at me, and I am very grateful that they saw something unique enough in me to keep sending me up to bat. You really cannot begin to do even remotely well as an actor without casting directors who put their faith in you, and once they do, so long as you continue to do a good job, they will keep bringing you back time and time again. The few ladies in Chicago who championed me really got me off on the right foot, and after four years of their benevolence in that magnificent town, I had amassed a very healthy résumé.

  That is precisely why, when I tried to transition my song and dance to LA, I had such a shitty pill to swallow, because nobody was really interested in theater work. Some few were, and I think that’s why they are the best, or the least lazy, casting professionals, because they have the wherewithal to examine and utilize the great pool of talent that exists in the small quality theater productions that LA can offer. Other than those exceptional casting pros, nobody really cared that I had done these plays. I was still able to do a good job in my auditions, but I had lost my Chicago advantage, where people more often than not would have seen my work onstage. With or without a leg up, casting is just a brutal process for the initiate. They might be looking at two hundred people, or only twenty people, but either way there will almost always be a few good people competing with you. Even if you do a great job, it might not matter, because maybe they want a taller guy or a more muscular guy or a handsomer guy and you just have to learn to bear that simple hardship.

  The better things began to go, the better the auditions I got, until I began occasionally testing for “series regular” parts on TV pilots. A pilot test is the most exciting lottery ticket one can lay hands on, because a TV pilot will generally look at “unknown” talent more seriously than a film will. Therefore, a person can suddenly find him- or herself with a legitimate shot at a show like Friends or Girls or Mad Men or Parks and Recreation, shows that value their performers’ relative obscurity, upon which fresh characters can be painted.

  So, imagine you’re living in LA in some version of squalor, chasing your dream of working on great material as an actor, whether you hope to make people laugh or cry or shit, or all three at once (my dream), and I’ll walk you through the emotionally vacillating steps of a pilot audition process.

  First of all, these are coveted auditions, so you’re a lucky son of a bitch if you are getting maybe twelve to sixteen new pilot scripts to peruse. Your agent has managed to get you auditions for the casting directors of three shows, let’s say as an alcoholic cop in one, a chubby stoner working in a Milwaukee donut shop in another, and in a third, you run a low-rent law firm representing primarily soft-core porn stars. That third script is clearly exploitative and terrible, so you reluctantly pass. There goes 33 percent of your hopes. The alcoholic-cop part will string you along, stroking your imagination for three or four auditions, but ultimately break your heart when it’s offered outright to Jeremy Piven, who was the guy who played that asshole agent on Entourage, which was a show that was on cable. I told you, it’s a tough business. So, a few weeks into pilot season, you are left with one basket into which you must gingerly place your hopeful eggs. All of your eggs. In the one basket of the chubby Milwaukee stoner, who is named Blowfish.

  You have been in for the casting director, and she had liked you already, so you come back in again for her as well as the writer and maybe a producer or two. They really like you. You get the jokes, and they let you know that they are really enjoying your comprehension of their humor. You are elated; holy shit, this seems to really be happening! You come back a third time, to read for all of them as well as the director this time. After the reading, which is once again full of enthusiastic laughter, they tell you in a conspiratorial tone that they really, really want you to be their Blowfish. The show’s creator confides, “Nobody is even coming close to ‘getting’ the writing the way you are, and your voice is exactly like what I was hearing when I wrote it.” Simpatico. Splendid! Seems like it’s in the bag!

  Now it’s time for your “network test.” This means the network executives need to scrutinize you for themselves, so that they may hold your performance and your résumé and appearance and demeanor and personality up against the statistical charts in their minds, a schematic of the current fashions in the zeitgeist. “Sure, he’s a good actor, but will the Maxim readers dig him?” They have already chosen to spend a lot of money on the writing and the premise of the show, their “fishhook,” and now they are hoping to choose actors who, one way or another, will be as irresistible to the national audience as juicy night crawlers upon said hook. This makes these execs simply the worst audience for whom you will ever perform. They are bankers and accountants, and they are not in the room to be entertained by you, they are there to judge your worth as bait, without sentiment. They are Upper East Side ladies shopping at Barneys, and you are but one of several pairs of fancy shoes being paraded in front of them for possible purchase. It’s the most exciting step in the sequence that can lead to booking a job on a television show and easily the most unpleasant.

  Before you can even get into the room, however, there are a few hurdles over which you must handily spring. Firstly, the night before the test, you hear from your “people” that there will be three other guys auditioning against you. Two of them you have become very familiar with from seeing them at the recent string of Blowfish readings, but the third remains a mystery. Your agent tells you that the network is probably bringing in a “ringer.” A ringer is an actor who boasts some sort of impressive television résumé, indicating proven and dependable chops. A person of whom the network can say, “Well, we didn’t like any of the new guys, but the kid from Freaks and Geeks is hilarious if we’re in a pinch.”

  For the last week, your agent has been hungrily discussing your “quote” with the network’s “business affairs” office. This means that the network is trying to leverage the cheapest possible price
for your services, whilst your agent fulminates with whatever ammunition he/she can brandish to win you (and him/her, to the tune of 10 percent) the fattest possible episodic salary.

  Your “deal” is made before you arrive on the day of the test, so before you can take your turn to stand in judgment before the bankers, you must sign all of your contractual paperwork. The pragmatic reason for this preemptive bargaining is so that, once the network wants you, once they are on the hook—“I must have Van Der Beek! Bring me the juice!”—James cannot then counter with, “Okay, swell. I would like thirty-seven million dollars.”

  The problem with this deal-signing step lies in the weakness of the human will (certainly mine, anyway). Let’s say this is your first time, and it’s one of the big networks, say ABC. Perhaps by now you have greeted the other two guys in competition, and also discovered that the mystery third man is in fact the second-funniest geek from Freaks and Geeks. You arrive at the equivalent of the network’s Death Star and are led sedately into a room, just short of being bound and blindfolded. Alone, you are seated at an intimidatingly vast conference table, where a lawyer from business affairs quickly walks you through the signing of a thick sheaf of papers, which is when you begin to see the numbers that make you weak.

  You multiply the episodic salary (say $17,500) by the number of episodes (twenty-two), then you multiply that by the number of years named in the terms of the contract (seven). Your vision immediately begins to swim with dreams of acreage in Illinois’s idyllic Sangamon River Valley and a brand-new pickup truck and some of those “fancy” jeans like McConaughey wears. It could not be made any more plain to you that your shitty life will be 100 percent salvaged if this 137-page lottery ticket to which you are applying your several signatures hits, and it doesn’t help matters that you are staring ravenously at one-in-four odds.

  Your head has completely flown out the window, and it is now that you are invited into the room to perform your rendering of Blowfish for the network comptrollers. Sure, there are a few friendly faces, like the casting director and the show’s writer/creator, who are also busy shitting little green apples of their own. (Especially the writer, as he/she watches helplessly while the corporation tries to thread disparate baits onto the hook that he/she has so lovingly and painstakingly crafted. “Let’s try this leech. Hm. Okay. Now the worm. Okay. Nice. Now bring in the wood grub. Oh, wow. I like this grub. I like it a lot. Do we have any other grubs? Can we look at some stink bait?”) Mainly this audience is hilariously unfriendly.

  One guy is just typing into his laptop the whole time, never even looking up at you. One lady is holding up a centerfold of Will Smith, looking at it with one eye and you with the other. Three be-suited versions of Hugo Weaving as Agent Smith in The Matrix fix their steely gazes upon you, without apparently comprehending you as a human being who is attempting to weave a clownlike diversion for their enjoyment. The casting director gamely tries to laugh at the right moments, generously sprinkling what I call the “courtesy laugh,” as does the writer, when he/she is not vomiting into his/her stainless steel water bottle. Needless to say, it’s a tough room.

  You are dismissed. You suddenly come to, finding yourself behind the wheel of your vehicle, blindly driving while replaying the audition over and over in your mind’s eye, coming up with way better versions than the one you just laid, slick and steaming, on the floor of the judgment room. Speeding toward the comforts of home or the coffee shop or the pub, you manage to keep your compulsive examinations of your cell phone to only every twenty-four to twenty-eight seconds. Finally, after a couple of excruciating hours, your agent calls. This is it!

  “Okay. You did great. But I’m sorry. It’s not going your way. They didn’t hire anybody, and they’re not sure what they’re going to do. They’re talking about retooling the character a little bit, and unfortunately for you I also think now they’re going to go after ‘a person of color’ for Blowfish. . . . I heard Esai Morales.”

  Again, I aver: Do not get into this business if you can help it. The scenario I have just described is not only quite par for the course, but one is considered incredibly lucky just to have the opportunity to have one’s guts ripped out so. Remember that, on every level in this business, you are an artist trying to get a job at which you will be paid (sometimes incredibly) well to perform or display your respective art to as large an audience as possible. If you are a purist who would simply like to create artwork, then you can do that wherever you are, beholden to no one, without ever going through bullshit of this brand. If you dive into the pool of sharks that is commercial entertainment, then you will forever be butting heads with the corporate interests that are trying to use your art to sell sandwich condiments, and that is invariably going to be an uphill battle.

  When I first moved to LA, John Cusack was coming by our house to pick up a mutual friend so they could go play basketball. When he arrived, we literally heard him coming down the block because he was screaming at someone on his phone. He blew in; shook hands, apologizing with, “Sorry, guys . . . my agent”; collected our friend; and they were gone. Pat Roberts and I looked at each other and said, “Always remember this. You can even be John Cusack, and you’re still just trying to get what you want, while the business is trying to get what they want from you.” Something I continue to learn about folks—really people in every business, but this one specifically—is that we’re all just people, people whose wants are often incredibly disparate. Knowing this and remembering this helps to keep the bitterness from encroaching on any territory in my soul.

  If you are as big a fool as I, and you can’t help but take a crack at a potential dream life of whiskers, scotch whisky, and steak, at a job where you are paid to eat bacon on a regular basis, then here are some tips on auditioning, which you can choose to heed as you wish or ignore completely.

  1. Perform wherever and whenever you can. Theater, improv, sketch, stand-up, whatever floats your boat. Practice will keep you sharp, and you never know when you’ll happen upon the “right place and time” for opportunity to strike. Sure, maybe everybody tells you you’re cute anyway, or you’re hilarious, but if you also continue to hone your skills in performing, it’s only going to up your confidence level “in the room.”

  2. Do more than perform. Work backstage at the theater, or get work on a film set, or even a music video. Watch the masters at work, studying all of their disparate techniques for effective storytelling. Think about different ways in which you might play a scene if you were thrown onstage or in front of the camera. If you can help out at any auditions “behind the camera,” jump at the chance. Run the video camera or help out by reading the scene material aloud with the actors. You will be guaranteed an inordinate amount of invaluable lessons from the parade of hopefuls on what to do and what not to do, I promise.

  3. BE YOURSELF. Megan talks about this a lot as well. When you read the audition scene, don’t ever think, what do I think these people want to see? Because that just weakens your strength, what makes you special. The only thing you have going for you is you and your unique take. What makes you and your friends laugh? That is the right way to approach any material. Megan spent years trying out different weird and funny voices at auditions, and the majority of the productions thought she was a crazy lady, until someone saw the vein of golden talent running through her hills and gave her the opportunity to create Karen Walker on Will & Grace. She never would have achieved that triumph had she lacked the guts to persevere in delivering her brand of strangeness.

  4. Be prepared. Don’t be a lazy fuck. Know your lines. Do your homework.

  5. Eat red meat. Producers like a pelt with a healthy glow.

  6. Don’t dress like a cop when you’re auditioning for a cop part. You don’t need a cowboy hat when you audition for Bonanza. You’re never going to score points that way. Think about it. “Well, he was only okay. I mean, he didn’t really know his lines. But y’know, that was a pretty sweet f
ucking stethoscope and set of scrubs he had on. Let’s give him another look-see.” The best outfit you can wear is confidence.

  7. (This is the most important, and it goes for life as well as auditions): Make your life happy. Sounds pretty simple, right? As you already know, it can be anything but simple, but check out this sweet-ass John Lennon quote:

  “When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy.’ They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.”

  When I first started auditioning in Los Angeles, I was depending upon the results of those auditions to make me happy. I quickly and efficaciously learned just how much that was a losing proposition. Even when things were going well, there just wasn’t enough love involved to feed a body, which was understandable, because it’s simply an arena of commerce when you get right down to it. It’s easy to become distracted by the beautiful people, the good times, and the swag, but ultimately, it’s just a business. What it is most certainly not is a life. Another John Lennon jewel: “Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans.”

  This one really hit me in the bread box. Recognizing the relative dissatisfaction that my “other plans” were bringing me, I immediately shifted my focus to filling in the rest of my life with whatever goodness I could muster so that my momentary involvements in show business held much less sway. It took me a few years, but I managed to create a deliciously satisfying life full of woodworking, theater, friends, and family, but most importantly the love of a good woman named Megan.

  I cannot stress enough what a positive effect this practice can have upon your auditions, and here’s the greatest part: Even if the people at the auditions are assholes and you are totally rejected, the joke’s on them, because you no longer give a shit! This security lends an undeniable swagger to your auditions. Gone are the days of sweating bullets through your reading because the one-week guest-star paycheck hanging in the balance would hand you the lifesaving two months of back rent you owe. The best part of step 7 is that even if, for some reason, you never get an acting job, you have tricked yourself, despite yourself, into enjoying an enduring happiness anyway. Pretty good trick.