My biweekly publishing schedule is strictly enforced by angry mobs that show up at my doorstep with golf clubs, heavy artillery, and mean words about my lack of ability to self structure creative output should I miss a deadline. They were angry last week. I’m recovering from their bruises and damages to my self esteem because last week, I did not publish. I am positive that each of you noticed my absence.
I didn’t publish because I had a callback the next day and it was literally all I could think about, and the only task for which I could justify putting in effort. If I wasn’t putting direct effort in, I was working on the callback by trying to chill out. I didn’t wanna talk about it in the newsletter anyway, for several reasons. For one thing, it feels lame. Real G’s move in silence like lasagna, I hear. But I am not a real G, I am Rishi. G is nowhere in my name. Look for yourself: Rishi Mahesh. The only G’s in this name are imaginary.
I also get worried about jinxing stuff. My mom coached my sister and I on the evil eye growing up. So sometimes I get nervous talking about professional and personal opportunities, like to speak about it is to cast a spell, undoing it. The other reason I get nervous is I have literally no idea what NDA’s I’ve signed at what points in my life and if any of them are actually real or enforceable.
For whatever reason, I never know to what extent you’re allowed to talk about the small wins or not. Is it lame, is it bragging, is it spiritually illegal, is it literally illegal? No clue. But if you can’t talk about small wins, what the F can you talk about in general.
I hope for this newsletter to be a place where I can be explicit and unguarded about my personal and professional life, because if you think it sucks you can always just go read a different email or something. In the spirit of that, I had two callbacks this month for big opportunities, and that’s taken up a lot of my brain space. It’s also maybe given me a cold.
For people lucky enough to not have contracted the brain disease that is Wanting To Act Professionally, a callback is when you go from taping auditions and sending them off into the digital ether, to being seen live in real time for a part, amongst a much smaller pool of contenders. Basically anyone who has ever been cast in something has gone through at least one callback first. Maybe not if they’re super famous or something but thinking about that gives me a headache so I’m gonna ignore that for now. Callbacks are great, and hellish for the same reason: they create a pesky idea in your head that you could soon be plucked out of reality and dropped into a life-changing opportunity.
I don’t mean life-changing in a super grand sense, I really do believe that no matter how the successes and failures of life are cancelling out at any given moment, the days will mostly remain the same. But I’ve found little victories to be life-changing in a smaller sense. Little victories make me feel like my compass is operational. They justify my further investment and confidence.
The big piece of advice with callbacks, and auditions in general, is to go hard and then completely forget about it. As an actor, after you enter the room and then leave it, your personal agency almost ceases to be a part of the equation. You could find out about the part, or not find out, on literally any timeline, and nobody is shy about ghosting.
Meaning that it’s not in your best interest to obsess over the outcome. They say you should do your work and then release any idea that it happened. Forget about the fact that with the flip of a coin, essentially, your life could change in a big way, or a small way, or it could remain the same. Just forget about it, and move on, like you’re a fucking sociopath or something and not someone pursuing the career path designed specifically for Sensitive and Dramatic Individuals.
The last newsletter I wrote happened right after my first callback this month, which was only my second studio callback ever. That one was a director’s session, where I auditioned in person on a lot and was one of four actors being considered. I wrote about this feeling then, too. Anyone who knew what was going on for me that week probably recognized that the analogies were paper-thin, and maybe everyone else reading could recognize that too? No idea. U guys don’t comment that much.
In that little story, I talked about how through the three darkened doors, were more paths that led to more doors. I didn’t know when the next time would be, that I would be offered a lit up doorway. But it happened a few weeks later, I got another callback and missed writing the newsletter (again, please do not find me and hurt me for doing so. I am allowed to miss a newsletter without incurring physical pain, which you people who show up at my house do not seem to understand. You are so desperate to read my newsletters and it’s getting weird. I will pursue legal action once I figure out how people do that for cheap).
But I didn’t write last week because it feels so trite to care about acting. It also feels like I’m giving away somebody else’s secret, like a popular girl kissed me and doesn’t want anybody to know, but I’m being weird and writing a Substack newsletter about it. By writing about my infantile career, I’m betraying the specter of Hollywood, giving away parts of the secret business that we take part in. Actors are pathetic people. We obsess over our careers, which are entirely self-serving and only personally fulfilling. We claim unwavering loyalty to an industry that is completely ambivalent towards our labor and sanity, yet we kiss its feet with the hope that someday they’ll tell us we’re pretty. It’s a vapid reality, made transparent by Hollywood’s Superbowl, which happened this weekend.
I will be embarrassingly honest, I think I’ve riffed Oscars acceptance speeches to myself since I first developed sentience. I wish I did not want one of those things. I wish I could say, and believe, that awards are totally meaningless to me, but they are not. They’re shiny gold prizes and a weird beast inside me salivates over them. I would love to win one of the highest honors for a skill I’ve dedicated my life toward getting better at. At the same time, of course, fuck that, oh my god. Look what goes down at the Oscars
Filmmakers and leading actors make a movie about the creation of the atomic bomb, which was crucially used to kill a bunch of people; they sweep the awards, and can’t utter a word about one of the largest mass killings of people in recorded history happening literally during the ceremony, not that many time zones away.
What’s the point of making a movie attempting to say something of substance about war, death, and killing, if you cannot then say something of substance about war, death, and killing, when the highest possible opportunity to do so is now thrust upon you?
But, in fear of sounding like an undergrad, I know to expect much more would be silly. There is and always will be a huge discrepancy between the face of the industry and the infrastructure behind it. Check out this commercial for oil and gas that played during the Oscars. Literally a commercial for Oil and Gas, which to me is completely insane, but that’s what funds the movie magic, I guess.
Credit where credit is due, Jonathan Glazer made one of my favorite movies of the year, The Zone of Interest, which felt to me like a workplace spoof of Nazi Germany, with sound design that appreciated the full gravity of its dark subject matter. When awarded best international film, he used the moment to say something explicit and meaningful about the occupation and genocide of Palestine, which you can see here. The Oscars have left his speech off of their website, apparently due to an issue of legal rights to the footage- and definitely not of legal rights in general.
The silliness is apparent to me, as I scorn the Oscars from the polar opposite end of the spectrum in my career, losing sleep over whether or not I will join the cast of a TV show. At some point, I hope to figure out how to let that feeling go. I wish I didn’t want a golden statue. But in the world where I can’t drastically alter my brain chemistry and value system overnight, I hope to god that if given the opportunities and the honors I dream of: to make work that is personally fulfilling as well as generally courageous, to use my passion to say things that matter to people who could change the world, I hope that in that reality on the other side of this spectrum, that I could choose to be a person that I, today, would write about proudly.
Thanks for reading.
Side note- a director I’ve worked with turned friend, Sachin Dharwadker, writes a great weekly newsletter about movies. He wrote this week about Glazer’s 2013 feature, “Under the Skin” and I recommend you check it out.