International Actors: International Industries

How successful can an upcoming actor be in an international entertainment industry?

This is the “research question” that I ended up asking myself my very last week in Berlin. My hopes of analyzing the German Hollywood and the youth aspirations of someday becoming the centerpiece of that realm came crumbling down after two weeks of one interview with a voice actor and nothing else. On top of that, there was only one person remaining within my group who was still seeking the true aspect behind our group purpose: youth culture in Berlin. I had many different fallbacks to choose from as far as research goes, but on the third week, after my long sought interview with the executive director of International Actors C.A., my hopes rose for a new topic of research which I later realized was much more relevant to my current and future academic/career goals. The words “International Actors” alone would get me creating different scenarios in my head of possibilities of getting work as an actor all over the world. Knowing the right steps to take and above all else, knowing the right people could make the dream of working internationally a reality.

As the end of my senior year at the University of Washington is quickly approaching, I’ve been deliberating the many possibilities for post graduate career seeking. My thoughts on a sudden career choice have started to dwindle as my options on graduate performing arts programs have become international. Before leaving for Berlin, I had aspirations of moving to Spain and staying with family to pursue an acting career or study within an Acting Conservatory program. It was either that or a California graduate school program. Those aspirations have now become fallback plans. Being a performer of multi-racial/cultural background and after having learned all that I did in Berlin on the dynamics of an international entertainment industry, the possibility of finding success as a an American actor in an international entertainment industry seems limitless. My excitement has increased ten fold and my eagerness to pursue a career within any entertainment industry is now larger than ever before. Throughout my research process in Berlin, I tackled and attempted to address the many issues facing actors in America (especially ethnic actors), and tried to showcase the similarities and differences between America’s entertainment industry and specifically Germany’s. Above all else, I analyzed the room for possibility for an American actor, ethnic or not, to be successful in an industry like Germany’s, on more than just a talent-based level.

During the past few years that I have spent working in the American entertainment industry, I have learned quite a bit. Most importantly, I learned about the moral and just decisions that many actors of color need to make in order to feel comfortable within the line of work that they choose to do. Within the American entertainment industry, racial stereotyping is a major issue. It took me a few years of personal experience to realize that I wasn’t very comfortable doing work certain work that could potentially be interpreted as stereotyping. I learned that the only kind of work I feel comfortable doing is work that I have to put a lot of effort into. Because of my appearance and my multilingualism, I have the ability to play people different ethnic and cultural backgrounds. An amazing trait to have, but on that comes with much responsibility. If I were cast to be in a theatre or television production in which I played someone with a different ethnic or cultural background than that of my own, I would only feel comfortable doing so if I had to work hard to understand the culture, language, beliefs and situation of the character I was playing. That is the kind of work in which any good acting program strives to teach any actor. Although, I have come across several situations in which I was asked because of my looks alone to pose for a print campaign as a person of a different background than my own. Although the pay would have been great, I did not feel comfortable that I was being asked to do this because I looked like something that I wasn’t. Had the print campaign wanted me because I was a young, attractive male, I would have no problem, but because the issue of racial stereotyping was involved, I had to say no and turn it down. One of the first questions I asked myself was if such situations like the ones I had gone through were a frequent occurrence in the German industry. How much of an issue is race in general in the German industry? If the issue does exist, how is it depicted, and how do the actors depicting it choose to perform in that line of work? These are the questions I needed to ask in order to get the kind of information that I knew would be helpful to aiding me in my pursuit of an entertainment career.

Having covered the moral issues and dilemmas that an international performer might face, I then had to figure out the logistics of how this all could become possible. Can an American performer just pop up in an international industry, such as Germany’s, get discovered and begin work the next day? We learn and hear about from the popular media of American actors traveling abroad to do filming for certain projects. It seems like that shouldn’t be too big of a hassle. In reality, the context of the work they are doing is completely doing. These actors weren’t hired by the international industry in which they are filming in, they were hired/cast in the united states and are merely traveling for the sake of on-site filming, or, perhaps, better general resources as far as filming goes. For an American performer to be allowed to work at all, especially in Germany, the performer must become a resident of Germany. Whether it’s through a simple worker’s Visa, or complicated residency application, no visitor on German soil can work in Germany for fear of taking jobs from local Germans. Once the residency issue is dealt with, getting representation is usually the next step. While Germans do seem to know quite a bit of English, there only exists two agencies within the city of Berlin, which has one of the largest bases for casting agencies, that represent people using foreign language as a basis for signing. International Actors C.A. and Friends Connection C.A. are the only agencies in Berlin that might consider casting a performer who was mostly fluent in English alone. Language has now become another issue in whether the possibility of becoming successful in an international industry exists. While Friends Connection will represent a performer who speaks only English, International Actors will not. They’ll appreciate that the performer is fluent in a foreign language, but if they do are not fluent in German, they have to turn the performer away.

If the performer was savvy enough to learn the language, and get residency in Germany and was eager to begin seeking work and representation, there’s one last thing the performer will have to consider. Who is their competition? Obviously, other performers, mostly German, but what is the difference between this American performer and a native German performer? First of all, the German performer will most likely be a graduate from a school of the performing arts from the German education system. These schools receive about 600 applicants a year, then only accept 10 and train them for four years to have the ability to get signed and cast within any kind of work they choose to specialize in. These schools have an intensive three round audition process in which to test the performer’s abilities physically, mentally, and perhaps emotionally. The auditions are held by a panel of faculty from the respective schools, each representing the different areas of study a performer can choose to concentrate in. The first round of auditions consists of two monologues, nothing more. The second, actors are called back and asked to perform feats of physical ability. They must prove that they can handle endurance, that they are physically fit, that they can handle acrobatics and of course, dance. In the third round they are presented with a piece of text in which they have an hour to memorize and perform for the panel. At any point in the second and third rounds, the performer must be prepared to present another monologue different from his previous two, if the panel decides they’d like to hear another one. The closest thing the American education system has to this kind of process is the audition process that most graduate school programs undertake. Those normally include, two monologues, a song, and a callback. These performing arts programs are catered towards undergraduates, recent high school graduates who have already begun their pursuit towards a career in the performing arts. Having assessed and considered all of the above, the possibility for success still exists. Why not? You learn the language, become a resident, find representation, and prove that the hard work done in the states is just as good to prepare you to compete with the locals. Although it may seem daunting, it is still possible.

This is how I came about my findings:

On our first official day of the program, I was having lunch and sitting next to our TA’s Tobias Temme and Manuela Mangold. Manuela asks me to elaborate a little on what it is I wanted to research in Berlin. Prior to my arrival in Berlin Manuela had sent me a link via email to the site for the Bureau of Agencies in Germany. The website had a link to every casting agency in all of Germany, the city with the most links was of course, Berlin. I explained to Manuela that I had contacted a few about possible interviews and that I was awaiting a reply from them, she continued to tell me that a good friend of hers, and now roommate to Tobias, was a working voice actor named Marian Funk that had just recently moved to Berlin from Frankfurt in search of better representation and better paying work. If anything, he would be a great subject for a case study, since he was in a way, starting from scratch by looking for new representation. Tobias and I worked out a time to meet with him and the interview was a huge success. I had him go back to his high school days and explain what it is that got him started in pursuing a career in the entertainment industry. It was also through this interview that I learned the logistics of the performing arts schools, what their programs consist of, and how he wound up pursuing a career in voice acting. At the end of the program, in the fourth year, there is a large showcase for major theaters and the Bureau of Agencies in Germany. Marian’s story is that he had become extremely ill around the time of the showcase and was bed-ridden for about six months. Not having much of an outlet for work, he was lucky enough to have had a great connection with his voice acting professor at his school in Frankfurt and she got him work doing radio and other voice over work. After a couple of years of working small-time voice over jobs, he decided he wanted to move to a city that had more opportunity for work and better representation for actors. So he came to Berlin and around the time of our interview was actually awaiting a phone call from an agency he had been in talks with for quite some time. A few days later, he was signed. The interview ended on a good note, with Marian offering to do some research for me on international schools and international agencies, not for my Berlin research but for my own personal career/post graduate research.

A week goes by and I have yet to hear from any of the agencies I had contacted earlier. I had another interview with Marian on Friday after watching the dance performance of No Body to look forward to, but I was beginning to realize, once that interview was done with I would hit a brick wall and not have anywhere else to go. Marian informs me that he had found me an agency called International Actors. On top of that there was a school in Prague that hosted international students and that one of their main concentrations might be acting. I later found out through an online interview through a friend of Andre Schur’s that the school only specialized in directing and other production/visual arts. I have my weekly check in with my advisors and express to them my concern for not having enough sources and my dislike of the idea of using a fallback arts education research route. They then suggest that I could use an interview that I would have coming up in the following week with the International Actors C.A. and see if I could find a definite focal point towards Turkish actors in Berlin specifically. I’m okay with the idea, but not entirely sold.

Before my interview with the executive director of International Actors, Rudolf Oshege, the class had an orientation and exercise with the director of the Maxim Gorki Theater on Maria Magdalena. At the end of orientation during a question and answer session, someone asked how common multi-racial casting was. Especially if any Turkish actors were ever cast in productions at the Maxim Gorki. The director said that it would be great to have actors from the Turkish community but that there just weren’t any out there. I arrive to my interview with Tobias as my translator to Rudolf’s office and commence my interview in a hurry. He was very busy and did not have very much time to offer. I find out that the goal behind his agency is to create representation for a small community of actors who will surely get cast by their looks and the different ethnicities they can portray and the different languages they can speak, but he worked hard to make sure that they wouldn’t be exploited. One very interesting thing is that he doesn’t allow any of the actors that he represents to do bit roles that are stereotypically cast based on appearance. All of his actors only do leading roles and strong supporting roles in TV, film and major theaters throughout all of Germany. He then proceeded to tell me that the majority of actors he represented were Turkish, well-trained and educated actors and that an all Turkish Theater actually existed right in my very own neighborhood of Kreuzberg. That was the end of our interview and I left surprised and excited that a very specific follow up had come out of my interview with Rudolf. Within hours Tobias was able to set up and interview with the Turkish Theater Tiyatrom for the following day.

My interview with the Tiyatrom people was short and sweet, but interesting. I went in with the goal of seeing how similar their theater would be to that of a professional theater in the United States. After my first question, that proved to be a bit difficult. I asked why the theater had been started, “…what was the motivation?” The director’s daughter explained that the theater had been started to give children and older youth a chance to hear a good example of the Turkish language through theater and keep it from disappearing form the youth’s vocabulary. They were noticing through the community that youth were speaking more and more German and ignoring their Turkish roots. So they started a theater that would only do productions in the Turkish language and they would gear them towards attracting a younger audience. This was the gist of what I got out of the interview, but afterwards I stuck around to watch a rehearsal and found something quite odd…there was no director! The cast was running the rehearsal entirely by themselves. No director, so stage manager, nothing. I asked one of the actors why there wasn’t anyone supervising the rehearsal, and she responded, “We don’t need anyone to supervise. We’ve been working with each other for five years. We know each other’s strength’s and weaknesses better than anyone else.” They were working in a company style. The director would cast the show and share his vision and run the first few rehearsals, but then it would be up to the actors to do the rest of the work until the opening of the show.

With all the information I had gathered on the different kinds of performance outlets and representation and logistics on becoming a performer in Berlin, I realized I had to try and show a representation of this within my group’s final composition. There was a lot of information and a lot was honestly, for my own future benefit. Since there were certain requirements that had to be met within the guidelines of the final composition, I made the executive decision to cater my findings to those guidelines. I chose to recreate a casting process that perhaps Rudolf might have hosted. He would probably have an open casting call and have actors go through, say their name, age and language and maybe that would be it. He would probably have callbacks later, but for the context of my scene within our composition, we would have everyone but me go through, take on different characters and speak different languages. I’m sure if I had more time I would have come up with something more encompassing of my entire research, but at the same time, if it were possible, I would have gone about my research differently. My interviews and observing worked fine for what I was trying to learn about the German entertainment industry, but ideally, I would have loved to do an actual audition, to be cast in a commercial, be an extra on my favorite German soap opera, but German law and time wouldn’t allow that. Besides the enormous of information I gathered the experience of this trip will be something I will never forget. It was a once in a lifetime experience and I do not regret any part of the turnout with my composition or how I went about my findings.