“Aha sure, but have you seen where my cow Daisy has gone?”

“This sucks.”

I couldn't really argue with Timmy, the panto did suck - and I was indeed not straight. Timmy is not his real name for two reasons: I don't know his real name, nor do I think ‘prepubescent fucking cunt’ is very mature of me to call a 12 year old from the Midlands.

Timmy would eventually put pauses long enough between each heckle so I could get through my lines and find my cow (who was just behind me the whole time??), finish the scene, and go behind the three 8 feet high wooden boards me and my two co-workers put up as backdrop for the December 2019 UK tour of Jack & The Beanstalk. Behind these boards - which acted as a divider between the wondrous lands of wherever-the-fuck Jack and The Beanstalk is set and what I can only call an emotional hellhole of a backstage - me and my two fellow actors would run sound, lights and perform costume changes when we were not on stage performing. The whole show was myself and two other actors doing everything. After the scene where my character Jack has been looking for his cow Daisy (and asked Timmy for assistance to no avail), I am to do the lights and sound for my colleague playing Jill, Jack's romantic counterpart, for her big solo “A Million Dreams”, a belter from The Greatest Showman. Jill does her number, she sounds great and almost sings loud enough with the backing track to drown out Timmy's relentless on-going 1-star reviewing. She completes the song to no applause, and returns backstage to me when our colleague switches places with her and goes on as the antagonist Fleshcreep. She sits down on the counterweight holding the backdrop upright, looks briefly at the brick wall behind us before starting to bawl her eyes out.

“Are you okay? What's going on?” I whisper switching between listening for my cue to do the lights and holding her hand.

“This is so hard. I hate it.” she cries into her hands. Her tears soaking the collar of Jill's outfit which never fully dries in the four weeks we're on the road, reeking of desperate Febreze.

I can only nod along in total agreement as I'm fumbling Fleshcreep's red and blue “evil lights” while thinking to myself: If this acting thing takes off, and there's a movie made of my life and career in the future, this is definitely the point in the movie where the audience will go “it can't have been this bad”.

It really was that bad. Working 12+ hour days Monday to Saturday (we had Sundays off), earning what works out to be £4.60 an hour (£336.00 a week), most nights sharing a bedroom with one of my colleagues so I couldn't even cry myself to sleep in private. We were three actors driving around in a Transit van doing two shows a day, at different locations each show, erecting the set and tearing down the set, running cables, setting lights a minimum of four times a day, often with at least an hour drive before, between and after on our way home. I lost nearly 10kg (one and a half stone for my tea-drinking friends, or 22 freedom-lbs) during the four weeks while playing Jack that Christmas. It was my first gig out of drama school having graduated with a BA in Acting a few months prior, and I was considered one of the lucky ones to have been given a role so quickly after graduating. After taking a bow to Timmy and the 11 other audience members at the Conservative Club that day (yes you read that right), there would be no paid actor on stage wishing they were literally anywhere else as much as I did over the next few weeks.

Surely this can't be what I studied and trained to do? Is this the result of a £70k acting degree? Where's the goosebumps and the excitement backstage just before going out to do my scene? Or the uncontrollable smiles before drifting off to sleep in bed at night knowing I get to wake up and do it again in the morning? I knew one thing for certain - neither was anywhere to be found in that fucking van.

I usually trace my dream of becoming an actor back to circa 2011, when I had just celebrated my 15th birthday. Quite late in my formative years you might say, and I can inform you that for a long time, I imagined myself travelling for work, seriously looking into the possibility of becoming a tour guide on cruise ships. So up there among the star dust, in an alternative timeline and universe, Tor Einar is on the Queen Mary 2 hosting an excursion for the elderly ashore Tenerife. Possibly a little drunk, as I do picture myself being a raging alcoholic in that life. No reason. In this timeline and universe though, 14 years ago, I had just become a member of a local sketch comedy group, for teenagers aged between 13 and 18. I had always been the class clown who loved any sort of attention, and would go to quite some lengths to obtain it. I quickly realised that wanting to be funny and joining a sketch comedy group was a match made in heaven for me. I loved it. We rehearsed every Wednesday night for a couple of hours, and it was all I could think about for the entire week. Wednesday became the new Friday, which made whenever Friday came around a couple of days later, feel like an out-of-nowhere bonus. I loved the people that was there, we quickly got a great chemistry growing between ourselves, and was directed and put into shape by the amazing Tom Reidar Bratteli, our instructor. His grandson, Daniel, was also part of this group and I thought he was the funniest out of all of us - which of course meant trying to constantly get a laugh just a bit louder, lasting just a bit longer, than the ones he got. Daniel is one of my very close friends to this day. He’s no longer the funniest person I know though, actually quite the opposite. He’s desperately unfunny and I don’t know how to tell him. It’s painful and sad. (For everyone else - this is a test to see if Daniel has subscribed to my Substack)

As the term ‘sketch comedy group’ suggests, our first show was formed of several sketches rather than one storyline throughout, so you get to play a lot of different characters - amazing. I remember our first show vividly, and my first time ever trying to make people laugh on stage. I was of course rightfully, though tastefully, defecating myself. What if they don’t laugh? What if the material we’ve been rehearsing for weeks simply isn’t funny? One of the things that Tom Reidar taught me, which I have brought to every stage and project since, is that there will come a point when you have rehearsed and rehearsed, said your lines in every conceivable way, come in with joke a bit quicker or slower - and you simply end up stagnating. It’s not getting better, it could even be getting worse the more you go over it. When you’ve reached this point, the one thing that you need, is an audience. This has always proved to be correct. I will never forget the feeling of a couple of hundred people laughing at the jokes I was saying, the slapstick I was doing and the characters I was becoming - it was the closest thing to an out-of-body, religious experience I’ve ever felt (only paired with when I saw Paul McCartney live last year). Like Trump after visiting Little Saint James for the first time, I was hooked and couldn’t wait till next time. That was when Tor Einar stopped looking at tour guide qualifications, and started looking at drama colleges in Stavanger - to become an actor.

Training to become an actor is a strange, strange thing to go through. Ask anyone who’s done it. It’s the best explanation of the saying “what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas”. You can’t really explain it to people who weren’t there. It is a deeply personal journey, and no one’s journey is the same. This is one of the reasons why, after having received my degree and when I look back, I don’t think it necessarily really works in the way it is advertised. It’s essentially three years of uncomfortable therapy sessions where you’re asked to shred away any sort of self-consciousness (you can bet your ass I google’d how to spell that) while doing dance and movement classes on the side. The amount of times I did classes where the whole premise was to share and re-live your life’s most traumatic moment, with the intended outcome of the ‘sharing’ becoming a tool that you can use as an actor to tap into when you need to act a certain way, was staggering. As a result, the amount of times we had to cut a class short because one of my peers had a panic attack, were not few. Don’t get me wrong, I learnt invaluable lessons (well - valued at around £70k) while training to become an actor in London. What I’m saying is that those lessons didn’t necessarily always come from a class, and more from doing the shows that happen twice a year and falling on your face and picking yourself back up while doing them - you know, ‘learning by doing’. I will most likely write a separate ‘stack’ on Rose Bruford at some point in the future, the drama college I attended in London from 2016-2019 as there are quite some stories.

One thing that my acting degree taught me was something well worth £70k, and ironically, something not really about acting at all. It was that the fact that us human beings change. You would think actors out of all people would realise this when spending as many hours dissecting and exploring a character’s arc and story as they do - simply that we change. Actors tend to have this toxic outlook of the world where if you start doing something else, or get a 9-to-5, or study something new after you’ve trained as an actor, you’ve simply given up and failed. It took me nearly four years after the pandemic to stop calling myself an actor when I met new people, not having acted in years. I was ashamed and worried people would think I was weak, and couldn’t “hack” the actor life. And on that subject - let’s talk a little about what the life of an actor in the 2020s looks like, shall we? For the majority of actors, 90% of the time, you’re not working, you’re looking for a job. If you’re one of the very lucky ones, you’ll sometimes get seen for parts and get to do self-tapes (queue that one anime ‘wow’ sound effect). It’s all self-tapes now, very rarely is a first round of an audition face-to-face anymore, which was a very disheartening realisation. Acting is an art, a performative art, a performance feeding from people in the room experiencing it. It’s not meant to be performed in your living room alone with a camera on a tripod - how self-tapes usually are filmed. My passion and love for acting exists on stage, or in front of a crew, telling stories to an audience - not to some casting director I’ll never meet or hear back from.

I had my “best week” so far in my acting career when I decided I didn’t want to pursue that life anymore. I had seven, different self-tapes, in a week. For you keeping score at home, that’s one self-tape a day. That’s unheard of. You’re lucky these days to get one self-tape a month, if that. One of them was a toilet paper commercial, it was the last one I did. I had turned down an invitation to the pub with my mates, as I needed to get this last self-tape done before the end of the night. I had done hours of work for these self-tapes, we’re talking at least a couple of hours prep and reading for each one spread across a week or so, which again for the people keeping score at home, that’s at least 14 hours of unpaid work as a trained actor with a bachelor degree may I remind you, with a fat Norwegian student loan to pay - £300 a month if you’re interested. Contrary to my peers with a UK student loan for example, I had to start paying this off monthly, shortly after graduation six years ago (I guess it does makes sense - Norway is famously strapped for cash). Fast forward, it’s hour number two, take five, and I’m recording myself pretending to squeeze out an imaginary log alone in my living room. I’ve got the take where you can actually tell when the penny drops (not the log thankfully), where I realise I’m not enjoying myself anymore. I’m 26 (at the time), and my twenties aren’t fucking slowing down. I’ll sneeze and I’m 30, and I won’t be wanting to stay in London my entire young adult-life either. What the fuck am I doing? This is the reality I learnt that drama schools who you’re paying £16.8k per year will never tell you about, or prepare you for.

Back to December 2019, at a school in South of Manchester, where I’m packing down the Jack and The Beanstalk set with my colleagues, when one of the 100-or-so kids who’d just been screaming their hearts out to warn Jack of Fleshcreep who was just behind him (Jack, seriously, just turn around once in a while) came over, clutching his special-ed teacher’s hand so tight I thought I could see a faint tear rolling down her cheek, looks up at me and goes:

“Jack?” I was still in costume as we’d often start taking down the set first to allow all the kids to exit the room before we changed and ruined the illusion, and subsequently their lives if they saw.

“Hello! Did you enjoy the show?”

“I really did. Thank you.”

“Ah, I’m so glad. Was it a bit scary at times?” (That’s me desperately trying to get compliments for my evil light-design from a seven year old.)

“Sometimes.” Eye contact is a rare commodity he doesn’t share with just everyone, and I can tell we’ve far exceeded his usual talk time.

There’s a slight pause before the teacher whispers in his ear: “Was there something else you wanted to tell Jack?”

“Merry Christmas.” He turns around, drags his teacher with him who mouths “thank you” to us all three as they exit the hall.

If you’re lucky, the remaining 10% of the time as an actor can be what reaffirms your career. There were kids present at most of the shows where there was no doubt that the travelling, annual panto was one - if not the highlight of the year. They were screaming like their life depended on it when Fleshcreep appeared, and helped Jack climb the beanstalk so he wouldn’t fall. Cheered when Jack got his Jill, and unsurprisingly wanted to crawl inside their own skin when it ended with a peck on the cheek (which was never not funny).

I’m finding myself very glad I wrote about this. Ask anyone of my closest friends, David, family members - I don’t often talk about Jack and The Beanstalk because it was genuinely a horrible experience. It was my first and last acting gig as a trained actor before a global pandemic reality-slapped me across my face so hard my lazy eye some days even doesn’t fucking open at all anymore. I had less money when I finished Jack and The Beanstalk than when I started, and it did ruin a few good Christmas songs for me that we played as an intro to every single show. ‘Step Into Christmas’ by Elton John for example makes me physically sweat when it start creeping over the tannoys in Morrisons circa just after Halloween, even now five years later (this must be what coming back from Nam felt like). 12 year old Timmy from the Midlands did make me question my career choice, and he did make my co-worker cry after she sang ‘A Million Dreams’, but I have perhaps tainted the rest of the tour unfairly with the one story from that Conservative Club. I had honestly forgot about the kid and his teacher coming up to me after one of the shows when I started writing this - and it made me remember thinking to myself after the kid left having wished me a Merry Christmas: “Hang in there Tor - this is who you’re doing it for.”

I trained as an actor, proudly, and I quite enjoy doing it to this day if I get the chance to, but it’s not important enough for me right now to spend the last bit of my twenties looking for acting work. That is not to say, in any way, that I think of my choice to exit the ring as the superior, more intellectual choice. Most of my drama school peers, including my best mate, are still actors pursuing a career with their degree. I can’t possibly respect or root for actors more, as I have first-hand experience of how unconditionally brutal the career can be, and how you’re usually left to fend for yourself during that 90% period I talked about earlier. My truth however, is I’ve now never been happier, in a stronger relationship, around better friends or felt more appreciated going to work as I do now with my 9-to-5. One of my favourite moments of self-discovery was when I realised I get the same kick from playing my Hofner bass guitar, writing and performing songs live as I get from being on stage acting. I’ve not failed at acting - if anything, acting failed keeping sole ownership of my passion. I like making people laugh and I love telling stories, not sitting on my own in my living room taking an imaginary shit. I’m a storyteller first - preferably a funny one - and a raw sex machine second (you can ask any of the two people I’ve shagged). Acting is a lovely looking feather in my cap which I choose not to wear all the time, and that works just fine for me.

Thanks Timmy. Or whatever your stupid fucking name is.

I’m not sure what Substack is to be honest (I’d never heard of it until today) - it was a Google out of desperation. A “surely I can’t be the only one who feels this way”-kind of Google. Me and David (my partner in crime) sat on the couch one morning this past week, both scrolling on Instagram in silence with only the sound of random, horrible brain rot videos between us coming from our phones. You know, your daily dose of the spinning OIIA OIIA cat (sorry in advance) and its countless renditions of Celine Dion hits. Then, for a couple of seconds, perfectly timed and in sync, we open the same video, at the same time, from the same creator’s story - and we both freeze and look at each other. I immediately lock my phone in disgust and my hands arise to support my head which has fallen off my neck. Did that just happen? Out of all the reels that you get spoon-fed every second on that app - we happen to start the same one, at the same time? I’m not religious, but that is probably the closest thing I’ve ever experienced to someone or something sending a sign to take a step back and think.

The idea of a newsletter has intrigued for a while. I like the idea of a way for my family and friends to once again (if they want to) subscribe to thoughts and anecdotes of their son, brother, friend, co-worker, former co-worker perhaps. My hope is, if I can stick this one out, for this Substack to become a newsletter for people who care to know what I am doing and what I am thinking about, to have something to read and experience for longer than a three second brain-rot reel or a five second swipe. I believe you can get this delivered into the inbox of your email. If you know who I am and are one of my dear family or friends, please count this as a ‘here’s what I’ve been up to’ since last time we spoke, and a reminder that I love you dearly. If you have no idea who I am, and you just like reading and looking at random photos from someone’s life - feel free to stick around as you are very welcome. If you’ve been on here for a while, can you tell me if I’ve substacked my first stack correctly yet?