“If I hear the word ‘self-tape’ in my house one more time, I’m gonna vomit,” Pamela Adlon deadpans, speaking to her experience as a single mother raising three daughters who are themselves fledgling actors.
But that’s also to say that Adlon has some experience melding the parenting and acting advice parts of her brain. When the matter arises on a recent phone call in promotion of Season 4 of “Better Things,” she practically bursts through the phone: “Oh, my God, I have so much fucking advice—I have to calm down right now.”
She says the No. 1 thing she’s learned in her 40-year career is the importance of living your life. She doesn’t want today’s creatives to be “prisoners to pilot season” (or today’s audition gauntlet equivalent) the way she was. Even when the work isn’t coming in, you have to have something—and someone—to fall back on.
How to Do It All, According to Pamela Adlon “You have to be a whole, interesting person in order to be an actor or a creator,” Adlon insists. “It really helps if you go hard into your life and you don’t just wait for acting jobs or the phone to ring.”
Today, that’s about carrying out the day-to-day responsibilities of life as an actor—“Take your classes, go do your audition”—while also taking the reins on your career and making use of the modern-day resources available. “It’s at people’s fingertips more,” she says. “There’s really no excuse for not creating your own content or making your own show, because you could do it on your fucking iPhone.” She also acknowledges, however, that limitless possibilities can be paralyzing. “You’re sitting there going, ‘I have all the resources in the world, I can just look up how to do this,’ and you’re stuck. So you have to figure out how to push yourself forward.”
The first way to get yourself out of such a rut is to surround yourself with people who inspire you. “It’s massively important to have a sounding board and to riff your ideas off of that person,” she says. “If you don’t want to write with somebody, have a friend, cook them a meal, sit them down, and say, ‘I just want to bounce these ideas off of you and I want you to give me your opinion.’ You have to be able to take in somebody’s criticism; it’s a means to getting you to the best place you can possibly be.”
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The second is to not think about career-building at all. Develop your personal self, and the creative will follow. “I fell into it and I pursued it from the age of 12,” Adlon says of acting. But, she admits, “I wish that I had expanded and traveled more…. It makes me sad that I would kind of sit around waiting for pilot season or, like, [thinking,] Maybe I’ll get an episode of ‘MacGyver’! I can’t go to Africa right now. Like, what the fuck was I doing?”
She has, to say the least, figured it out since then and today invests as much time into her work as she does her family, mining the latter for the former on her semiautobiographical FX series. She’s also heralded by those who work with her for creating a set that’s as inclusive and diverse in front of the camera as it is behind it, an effort she describes as “one of the greatest gifts that I have in making my show.” Better yet, it’s all done to maintain the same ethos that drives her work all around: to look at her life and her world and make art out of it. “This is the way my world looks, and that I want the world to look. Inclusiveness has to be deeply woven into the structure of everything.”
This story originally appeared in the March 19 issue of Backstage Magazine. Subscribe here.
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