Bryan Cranston is one of my favorite actors. I was recently inspired by a video of him in 2016 doing a Q&A at Point Park University. Although he was talking to the audience about acting, to me it felt like his advice could be applied to other areas of life too.
Back then, his approach to auditioning for a role was like interviewing for a job. You can’t really blame him for looking at it like that. Directors are essentially hiring employees, aren’t they? Except in their business, the boss encourages their employees to be someone they’re not — and to do so convincingly in front of the camera.
Over time, Cranston came to understand something important about the hiring process.
“When you put yourself in a position of need or want,” he confides to the audience, “you relinquish control over to some unknown entity.”
He explains that directors tend to not want to hire people that need a job; they want to hire people that know what they’re doing.
If an actor’s job is to create a compelling character, tell a good story, and present it, then that’s the only thing someone going to an audition should focus on — not trying to please the director (although I’m sure that might also help, I suppose, but that’s not the point).
If the director’s problem is, “Who should I cast for this role?”, then Cranston’s merely giving the director an option. It’s up to the director to consider whether or not it’s actually the solution to their problem.
He isn’t walking into the audition room to get a job; he’s there to do a job. Everything else after doing the job is out of his control.
This was liberating for him.
Where he realized this was at a seminar in the 70s he was attending. Someone there told him: “Success is just focusing all your attention on the thing that you do and love, without having a claim on an outcome.”
This was profound for me. As someone who writes and shares what he writes, I tend to still get so caught up in wanting people to like what I do, I forget what I’m actually supposed to do: share ideas as clearly as I can.
We could extend Cranston’s philosophy to other areas of our lives too. Just focus on doing the best work you can. Let go of the outcome.