@marg928 How old was this actor who took your daughter aside for the unsolicited advice? While they usually mean well, something I have found is that you have to be careful in listening to screen actors in their 30s who came along in the early part of the last decade when the market was very different than it is today.
Back then, there were lots of shows like “The OC” which made the 18-to-play-younger casting range all the rage and it was a real possibility that a good looking kid from the Midwest could just show up in LA with very little training or experience and find himself on a show six months later while being primarily trained by a set coach. Moreover, most of the casting took place in person in LA or sometimes NYC instead of the situation we now face with classically trained Brits and Aussies with mile-long resumes who are also “perfect” for the role that we thought might make our careers just a click and a video away.
If you’ll notice, most of those young actors from back then who came to prominence that way are no longer on the scene because they never developed the craft to transition into serious adult roles. They have been phased out and supplanted by those highly skilled Brits and Aussies who were making their own way on the BBC or ABC while the American actors who had taken the time for proper training were for the most part being shut out of the market by the 18 tpys and were not getting the experience needed to be considered ripe to carry a network show or a big budget film. This is why you sometimes hear actors in that age range who earned BFAs grouse about how it “never did anything” for them although I have found that if you really back them into a corner about it, they will usually admit that the training did what it was supposed to do which was to make them better actors market-be-damned.
Thankfully, it’s just not like that anymore as the numbers I have offered here would seem to indicate.
@soozievt The Tischies are tearing it up this year, aren’t they? I almost didn’t want to post this because nobody from my school has booked yet. But hey, I’m already on a show and I went there, dammit! haha