The following Career Dispatches essay was completed via an as-told-to-by interview between managing editor Benjamin Lindsay and Nikesh Patel, who can currently be seen starring on Rose Matafeo and HBO Max’s new series, “Starstruck.”
It might be because I’ve just been working on and talking about a rom-com, but I think a lot about having a “healthy relationship” with your career and making it feel like it’s a reciprocal arrangement.
Kaley Cuoco Has Always Been Here A lot of the time as actors—particularly as junior actors or when you’re starting out, but it’s also true as you get more experienced—there is a sense that putting your career first, whatever that might mean to you, can mean that you’re getting the most of it. There’s something to having a work-life balance. I remember Amy Poehler has that brilliant comparison; she compares the career to having a bad boyfriend, and I think that resonates quite a lot in terms of: It’s this wonderful thing that can sort of whirl into your life with promise of great times and new experiences and can make you feel incredibly fulfilled and incredibly high in some ways. And then without warning, sometimes it feels like you’re ghosted and there’s no explanation.
So my thing has been, as I’ve gotten a few years under my belt, realizing that it doesn’t have to be that way, and a lot of that is about the importance of what you do when you’re waiting for a job. There’s something about this culture we have at the moment with social media and the influencer culture, that you’re only as good as how much you hustle. All of that motivational stuff is great, but what it often doesn’t allow for is space to reflect on what we do when we’re not acting. It’s this huge part of the job, what you do when you’re not working, and it sometimes feels to me almost an admission of defeat. Like, how could you even think about not working? When a job does come along, you’re in that wonderful position where you’re getting paid to do what you love and it’s a huge privilege. But it’s what you do outside of that that is a measure of your longevity in this career.
“But it’s what you do outside of [acting] that is a measure of your longevity in this career.”
My experience was that I basically went through the educational system. I live in the U.K., so I went to school and then university and then after that, drama school. So I’ve been in the trenches for pretty much all that time. There was a wake-up moment where, after you come out of training, you have no structure. That was a real wake-up call for me: I have to fill that time in a way that is gonna feed me—sometimes literally, but also creatively, so that might be if you’ve got a talent for creating work or just exploring aspects of yourself that you haven’t had as much of a chance to stretch.
For me, a turning point came where I’d had a pretty long stretch out of work, I think it was a year and a half, and I was fed up with giving my all for auditions. Outside of that, it felt like that was the only thing that defined me. So with a friend, we came up with this idea of starting our own business, and it was sort of related to acting, because we had this idea of doing Shakespeare workshops in schools. What was eye-opening to me was that it was completely out of my comfort zone in terms of what I was experienced with doing, but there was a lot of good will out there from people that heard about our idea and knew that we were serious. They agreed to mentor us and put us in touch and got us onto apprenticeship schemes and helped us write business plans and all this stuff that I would never have really experienced had I shied away from doing something that was, in a lot of ways, not what I was “meant to be doing.”
It was a really great learning experience, and it got to a point where we envisioned starting something that we would be able to run as a second business to support our acting careers. Then as fate would have it, around the time where my business partner and I devoted a little bit of time and knuckle down, bearing in mind that work had been pretty quiet, I got a job which was one of those “you can’t pass this up” opportunities. It was six months on a series back home called “Indian Summers,” filming in Malaysia with Julie Walters, and it was a conversation that my business partner and I had to have. I’m very grateful to her for understanding and saying, “Look, you’ve gotta do this. This is what it’s all about.” But I look back on that time really fondly because it did make me realize that the time that I was working and applying myself and not waiting for the phone to ring was really beneficial to me, because it meant that I wasn’t beholden to my agent calling for a sense of purpose. And I feel like I’ve got a lot of transferable skills from that experience that may, at some point, come in handy if I want to start other sort of entrepreneurial business ventures.
So in some ways, I’d go back to my younger self and say, “Don’t put things off that you’re interested in, that you’re passionate about,” [even if] that is exploring another calling, which might sound like heresy. Or even the little things, like if you feel like you need to take a holiday after a job, that shouldn’t come with a crushing sense of guilt. Take a break. The best time to do it is always straight after a job because you’ve earned that breathing time with your agent of going, “I need some time for me, and then I’ll be back.”
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