Tuesday, May 8, 2012

Another Audition part 2

I went to the audition. They seemed pretty excited to have a foreigner there. There are plenty of foreigners in Hong Kong, but I guess I was the only one auditioning for them.

Everything was going well. They seemed very enthusiastic about having me there. Then they asked me to take off my clothes.

There were alarm bells in every language.

The thing is, they seemed like professionals. This was in a professional office in a professional building. This wasn’t one of those auditions in a hotel room or at Starbucks. I wouldn’t even show up for that. These are people you can look up on Google.

They said the part requires running away from the bad guy down a busy street while naked. I have two problems with that – I don’t want to do it and this was a first audition.

People say I’m a prude and need to loosen up about the whole nudity thing, but you don’t get naked at a first audition. Ever. Even if the part is nothing but all nudity all the time, nobody takes their clothes off until much later in the audition process. The first rule of auditions is that if they ask you to get naked, wear a bikini, lingerie or some weird S&M outfit, or do anything kinky at the first audition then that’s a major red flag warning. That’s simply not the way a professional casting is done. If they need you to do anything out of the ordinary, for whatever reason, that sort of thing always comes later. I know this is Hong Kong, but common sense applies everywhere.

So I said no and that’s the end of that. No horror movie for me. I don’t mind. I don’t want to do a nude scene. Especially in my first movie. Especially in some horror movie. If Steven Spielberg calls me to do Schindler’s List II: The Revenge of Shofar and he wants me to play the lead and get naked in a group gas chamber scene, I might think about it. That’s probably going to be a much better movie, assuming they change the title. And there’s absolutely nothing sexual about murdering people in gas chambers. The nudity in Schindler’s List was not at all titillating or gratuitous. That’s the kind of nudity I don’t even really notice when I watch a movie. A bikini babe bouncing her tits up and down in close up is a little more indefensible.

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