Don’t Badmouth Any Acting Job. Ever.

Whether you’re brand new or a name, you will work on projects you don’t believe in. The character is flat. The writing is thin. The plot has holes you could drive a truck through. The directing, the editing, the score, the set; everything amateur, nobody sure what they were doing. I’ve been on a few of those. You will be too.

Here’s the rule: stay quiet about it. For how long? Forever.

What the rule is not

It’s not a rule against honesty. You can be candid about your own performance, and you don’t have to rave about something you thought was mediocre. Critique is part of the life, it helps everyone grow, and an audience finds a little honesty refreshing. What you avoid is criticizing, bashing, mocking or putting down a project you were part of. In other words: don’t badmouth any acting job.

It’s bad business

We’ve all had jobs we didn’t like and bosses we liked less. Some rules are silly and some tasks are embarrassing. Badmouthing a bad job is still bad business, and in this business especially, because the industry is a network, and despite its size it’s a small one with a long memory. Notice how certain directors use the same actors project after project? That’s the network working. It works the other way too: actors quietly drop off a shortlist because someone remembered what they said about a producer once. A reputation takes a career to build and a sentence to lose.

Make yourself indispensable instead. Show that you alone fit the part, and that you’re the most likable, hardest-working person they’ve ever had on a set. That’s the actor who gets called back, and no amount of being right about a bad script is worth trading for it.

Somebody loved that thing

Here’s the part actors forget. Have you ever heard one of your favorite actors make fun of a role you loved? A director insulting a movie that meant something to you at fourteen? It sours the memory a little, and it wasn’t meant for you, and it landed anyway. Sometimes an audience meets an actor for the first time in something that would never win an award: a cheesy commercial, a guest spot on a show nobody remembers. For whatever reason it endeared that actor to them, and they’ve watched everything since. Insult the project and you’ve insulted your fan.

You never know who will see what you do, no matter how small the role seemed at the time. That’s a good reason to give your best performance every time, and a better reason to never speak badly of it afterward. There will always be people who don’t like your work for no good reason. Don’t go around handing them good ones.