Hello beautiful people!
Let’s explore what’s under the coolest umbrella ever!
Oh, and in case you’re wondering, these are all examples from one of my client’s type list. Full-disclosure, this actor wasn’t my client at the time he first shared his “type bipolar disorder” with the group in front of which I was doing this particular speaking engagement.
There we were: me, standing up front, doing my talk to a room of a hundred or so eager actors and creatives who had gathered this Saturday morning at the SAG-AFTRA Conservatory to be inspired and empowered; him, sitting in the back, arms crossed, challenging me to finally crack this type disorder that made it impossible for him to “do” this whole branding thing, which he was pretty sure was hooey anyway.
“Ah, so those types again are…” I began, and then I listed them back to him. As the crowd got excited to see where this would end up, he smugly said, “Yes! See? Good guy? Bad guy? Who am I? This is all over the map!” To which I confidently replied, “Yeah, hon. Those are all types under the same brand umbrella: You’re a leader.”
Mic. Drop.
Now, of course, this sort of connector is easy to see from the outside. A clear thru-line is often identifiable from without, but not so much when it’s your casting reality (or when you’re a splitter, looking for differences in data that would be more powerful when lumped; Day 37).
After his lightbulb moment realizing that I was leading him to his brand — the umbrella under which all these previously seemingly “bipolar” (drastically different) major type categories exist — he became my client. Kool-Aid: drunk.
Today’s work: Revisit your types and see what takes shape as your brand umbrella. Try not to split when you should lump. We’re looking for what these characters you’ve played (or auditioned for or been typed as through surveys) have in common, not how they vary. And they DO have something in common or you’d not have played them. Period. YOU are the thru-line.
How do we describe that “youness”? That’s your castable brand.
One of my lifer clients was lamenting that she kept getting “vixen” as her brand umbrella and it just hurt her heart. She’s a rule-abiding, sweet-as-pie, would-never-talk-about-you-behind-your-back-much-less-steal-your-man kind of gal. But her type clouds kept filling up with words like “hussy” and “sexy” and “manipulative” and “calculating” and “hot” and “man-eater” and on and on.
She knew “vixen” was her brand. She understood it academically. She had bookings galore to back it up. But she just couldn’t reconcile it with who she actually is. That’s the word she used: reconcile. It seriously kept her up at night. It was starting to affect her work. How could she play the vixen when it so went against who she felt she was at her very core?
I asked her this: Why does reconciling how you are perceived as a brand (a brand that creates art for a living, art that is often fiction or at least a creative depiction of nonfiction) with who you are as a person so feel dang important? How is it that you’re feeling prevented from moving forward with your work in a world of fiction, portraying roles that align with how your art-creating brand is perceived, simply because that art-creating brand is so far off from who you truly are?
Do harmless, pacifist actors who play serial killers lose sleep that they’re playing roles so far off from who they are? Do those who play superheroes worry people will assume they’re being cruel when they don’t use these fictional superpowers out in the world (y’know, since they don’t actually have any superpowers)?
Ah. There it was. Because she had spent a good chunk of her life being assumed the vixen in her real life due to her looks and her demeanor, it rattled her to constantly be cast that way. Correction! It rattled her to constantly be LABELED that way. The storytelling, the craft of it all… she was actually just fine with!
So, we softened her brand umbrella identity by adding a word to the mix. And this word actually unlocked a whole new tier for her because it added texture to the more complex roles AT the next tier in a very specific way. She is “the reluctant vixen.”
Yes. I am very good at this. 😉
“The reluctant vixen.”
Ooh, that’s delicious. And a slam-dunk for the energy she brings into the room and onto the screen.
Here’s something I know for sure: Every person at the highest tier has learned to lean into the thing they once tried to get away from. High-achievers in this business turn their (once-perceived) weaknesses into strengths (Day 4); learn to love hearing that they creep people out (Day 21), are seen as aloof, play a great space cadet, could be a zombie… whatever. How do they deal? I mean, besides knowing that they are enough (Day 3), that is?
And so will you when you get good at leaning into your most castable brand. Start by keeping it simple. Don’t overanalyze anything. Just lay in that juicy data (go back to Day 8, Day 19, and Day 21), remember that there’s greater value to data from projects in which you’ve been paid to portray a certain type than one in which you weren’t paid (or for which you paid to play it, as in creating your own on-brand content before someone else has invested in you doing exactly that), use a tool like Visual Thesaurus if you’re having trouble connecting the dots, brainstorm with your ninja community to collect nuggets you may be missing due to your oversaturation with this particular subject, revisit Day 39 to see whether your brand umbrella may come packed with an element of hiding its true nature (mystique) or coming at something very common in an uncommon way (innovation), and — again — don’t overthink this!
As my beloved jackass Keith loves to say, “Your brand is the shit you do in your sleep, not in your dreams.” This should all look effortless on you (which is why you often don’t see it). Oh, and never worry about Keith being called a jackass. He takes that label all the way to the bank, baby.
’til tomorrow… stay ninja!
