Daily Actor: Not Booking the Role

Talk TV World is excited to welcome Lance Carter as a featured blogger. With Hollywood, and the television industry more specifically, full of a seemingly endless amount of working actors, we invited Lance to contribute his point of view. Lance first got his SAG card in 1993 and moved from the east coast to Los Angeles in 2004. Aside from acting, Lance runs www.dailyactor.com, a site providing Hollywood news and interviews to all actors.

In the past couple of months, I’ve had the opportunity to audition for some of the most popular shows on TV; 'House,' 'Criminal Minds,' 'Parks and Recreation,' 'Modern Family' and 'Cougar Town.'

Great shows, right?

No, those shows are horrible! They stink! Don't watch them!

Ok, that's not true at all. I just had a brief moment of not-booking-the-role bitterness. These are actually great shows and they're Season Passed (is that a term?) on my TiVo.

A couple of weeks go by and I'm lying on my couch watching TV (shocker!) when I turn on the episode of 'Modern Family' that I auditioned for and there was someone else playing my part. He wasn't anything like me. He was another race, size and type.

In the next weeks, I watched the other episodes I went out for. 'House' had cast a short, nebbishy guy. 'Criminal Minds' gave the part to an actor who was about 20 pounds lighter and gaunt (the role was a weasel landlord), 'Cougar Town' cast a woman and 'Parks and Recreation' was completely written out.

Now, granted, I wasn't going out for huge roles but I realized that the actors that were cast were perfect for those parts. Those parts weren't supposed to be mine. You get the roles that you're supposed to get.

I know I could think the opposite way: My resume would be killer if I had booked these roles. My bank account would love me. I'd get the opportunity to audition for bigger roles. My ex-girlfriends would be jealous seeing me on TV.

But, I hate to say it, maybe things do happen for a reason.

One of the million reasons that I love this career is that you never know what can happen. One minute you’re working at a boring tech support job telling someone to re-boot their computer for the umpteenth time, the next you could be cast in a civil war movie where Stephen Lang is yelling at you to stop being a wimp.

That’s what happened to me.