©2015 Sabryna Walters 1

. SURVIVAL INSTINCTS . 27th November 2015

Written by Sabryna A Walters

It’s the age-old question of ‘How do you survive as an actor in this industry?’

For some it’s been a fast paced rise to the world of cameras, red carpets,

trailers, name in lights, signed contracts etc. For others, like myself, we’re still

aspiring to the dream of being a constant working actor & being able to

solely live off of that income & somehow keep our artistic integrity in tact.

I believe ultimately it starts with why did you fall in love with this industry to

begin with? For me it started way before I even really knew what “being an

actor” was. My mother was a single mother juggling going to university,

working jobs to pay the rent & somehow raising me. It meant that as a child

I’d mostly be the one cooking dinner in time for when she got home, & often

keeping myself company by watching whatever was on the TV. I never really

responded too well to cartoons, as I always preferred to watch real people &

pretending that I could be apart of their story too. It was always in succession;

Bold & the Beautiful at 4:30pm, Fresh Prince of Bel Air at 5pm, switching to

the news at 5:30pm (there was never anything too good on & by that time I

would have started on dinner) & then it would move into more American

sitcoms.

Although I grew up in the upper north shore of Sydney, Australia… I could

never find myself watching any of the Australian shows because no one really

looked anything like me. Where as the American shows always seemed to

have at some point a character with brown skin or music that had an essence

of soul & groove that always resonated with me. My favourite musicians when

I was much younger were Ray Charles, Billy Joel, Lauryn Hill, Nina Simone &

of course Michael Jackson.

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My mother was a very intelligent, focused & driven woman. For a young

Pacific island girl who grew up in the villages of Samoa, she’d done incredibly

well at getting herself out of that environment & making something of herself.

She was studying economics & worked a lot in logistics management –

something that to this day, I still don’t fully understand. But for an

academically intelligent woman, my mother was never too good at dealing

with her emotions. She bottled them up but they were always boiling

underneath the surface & most nights, her anger would be taken out on me.

I’d often have bleeding noses from beatings & bruises that needed to be

covered up for school the next day. This went on for years & years, ever since I

can remember, but the first time it changed for me was one night watching an

episode of Law & Order.

I couldn’t have been much older than 7

years old & mum would frequently come

home late from either university or work.

I’d always make sure there were left

overs for her from dinner (I didn’t need

another reason to ignite the volcano),

but this one night while eating dinner by

myself & watching an episode of Law &

Order, my world changed completely.

In the episode, there was a man who

had done some pretty horrible things & one of them was abusing his young

son that was around the same age as me at the time. The police were trying

to get him on other charges but they needed his son to come forward with a

statement? An accusation? Anything to get this bastard in jail. Now his son

was scared to come forward. I remember in this particular scene the detective

was trying to encourage the boy to speak but the little boy kept crying &

saying, “Where will I go? What will happen to daddy? Who’s going to look

after me if you take him away?”

The moment that changed my life forever was the detective’s response:

“What your father is doing to you is wrong. If he’s hurting you, that’s not what

daddy’s are suppose to do. There are families that will look after you & I will

make sure you will be safe.”

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Of course they most probably weren’t the exact lines but in my memory, it

was something to that affect. Up until that point I thought every child like me

was getting beaten up. I believed that’s how you were brought up & then I

learnt, through an episode of Law & Order, that in fact that was not the case.

It took me a few years until I finally had the courage to leave, but when I was

12 years old I finally ran away from home after having a knife put to my throat,

with no shoes, a bruised lip & a bruised cheek that would come into fruition a

few days later.

In between those 6 or so years from watching Law & Order to running away &

asking to be put into foster care until I was 18 years old, that’s when my real

“acting” began; but never for attention or praise. My acting was purely a

survival instinct to get through day by day.

When you think about it in terms of my Law & Order experience, all it was was

an actor speaking to another actor, a director & DOP filming it & a writer who

had written some words on the page. What it was to me as a young child was

one fictional scene that correlated with my real life & taught me &

encouraged me to make a change.

It wasn’t until I was about 16/17 years old & had decided that I wanted to be a

Professional Actor as a career choice when I properly realized how powerful

that experience was. Then when I reached Drama School, it sunk in on a

completely new level just how important we as artists are to society & how

aware we must be to our Responsibility as artists, storytellers etc.

That early influence also has a huge influence to the roles I choose to play,

how I approach them & how I respond to certain material. If it’s a role that’s

simply to entertain, I’m not too into it. I’d much rather it go to someone else

than to waste my time working on thin material that may inflate someone’s

ego, including my own, but will be forgotten in a week’s time when they & I

move onto the next set of material.

So when it comes to Survival Instincts on how to survive in the industry, my

basic belief is going back to your roots. By now we’re mostly aware of the

politics, financial machine & artificiality that comes with being in this industry.

It can at times be a ruthless intoxication of being seduced & abandoned by a

world of make believe but then every so often you connect with those

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moments of Truth. Whether it’s in a scene & connection to the words on the

page, a deeper understanding of the circumstances of your character, a

moment of locking eyes with the actor you’re make believing with, a creative

dance in execution with the director or an audience member/viewer coming

up to you & saying “You just helped me understand my mother a little more.”

Whatever moment it is, I find in most cases, it’s a moment when we really get

past the protective masks we put up every day, we find ourselves free falling

into a pool of human experiences, with people that we probably wouldn’t

come across or choose to stick around with. But somehow in this game of

make believe, we eventually get to a point of deeper understanding & in

return our perspective on our everyday lives is enriched & enlightened with a

little more clarity.

If you want to stick around, if you want to be “relevant”, I believe you have to

know what you want to say with your set of gifts. Something that’s outside of

yourself, that isn’t about your own ego (though at times we do need to be in

touch with it to at least keep afloat), & something that exceeds the physical.

It’s absolutely realistic to not know at times, & that is where you need to

strengthen your courage to be okay with going away for a while & figuring it

out all over again.

We change. We evolve. We expand. With those changes you need to give

yourself permission to do that with your creative & artistic gifts, & when you’ve

explored those to the furthest degree possible then you will always be

“relevant” because you are grounded in something deeply rooted. You’re not

just putting on another mask to please your agent, your family, your partner,

to prove to your peers that you got it going on, because let’s be honest…

most of us the majority of the time don’t know what we’re doing or when

we’re going to get a chance to work again.

The difference is when you know WHY you were seduced in the first place,

you can then have a better chance of knowing where & when to make your

adjustments to stay or move on.

Written by Sabryna A Walters

SW