Between the Academy Awards and all the entertainment-related shows on television, it's easy to assume the acting life is about limousines, designer dresses, expensive jewelry, and more leisure time than you know what to do with.
Unfortunately, the down-to-earth, everyday life of an actor is rarely so glamorous.
In fact, the acting life requires plenty of hard work just like any other profession.
Want to know what a typical day on the set of a motion picture is like? Have a look ...
Your call time is 7 am, so you're up at 5:30 or earlier.
This allows you enough time to shower and dress before you jump in the car and fight your way through the morning traffic to the studio.
There are no shortcuts in Los Angeles.
In fact, it's rare when you find a rush hour.
There's always plenty of traffic and it's always moving at a snail's pace.
At the studio, you park and shuttle to the film set, where you check in with the second director and join the food truck line for a quick and anything-but-nutritious breakfast.
Before you get a second bite out of that glazed doughnut, the wardrobe girl pulls you aside to take measurements for a change of shirt for your scene.
From there, it's off to makeup, where you can easily kill an hour (much more if you're doing a science fiction or horror flick), and then finally to the set.
Everything's almost ready to go at the set.
The director's there, the lighting crew, the camera crew.
The director pulls you aside to let you know about a few line changes in your dialogue, the same dialogue you were up memorizing most of the night.
You've got a few minutes to rehearse the new lines while they finish setting up the scene, and that's all you've got.
So you spend your time away from everyone, in the peace of your trailer, as small as it may be.
Before you know it, there's a knock on your trailer door and you're called back to the set.
Time to get serious.
You take your mark.
The director yells, "Action!" Your co-star speaks a line or two, you respond, and the director yells, "Cut!" The sound boom struck a light and blew it out.
Once the bulb's replaced, the scene starts at the beginning again.
Finally, you're rolling now.
A few takes from different angles and it's time to change the set for the next scene.
In the meantime, you wait.
Maybe you go over the dialogue changes.
Maybe you try to track down something to eat.
Maybe you try to catch up on the sleep you lost the night before when you were nailing your dialogue.
And that's the way the rest of the day goes.
You spend about 10% of your time acting and 90% of your time waiting.
It can make for long, boring days.
And unless you're close to the director, you most likely won't have any sense at all of how all your little shots are going to come together in the end.
Sometimes the result is brilliant.
Sometimes the result is dreadful.
But that's all out of your hands.
You're just the actor.