Small World

When I started acting a couple of years ago I kind of thought that I would end up seeing the same actors occasionally, or even working with some of them. I met Rob Wainwright on a short back in March 2010 and I think we’ve worked together some six or seven times since, but many of those projects have been one of us deliberately getting the other involved.

So, last Monday night. I went to the screening of a short film I mentioned in a previous post: Collide. Now you may not think this of me but I’m not actually overly keen on watching myself, especially on a big screen with a load of other people when I’ve no idea how good or bad my performance is, but I had a twitter conversation with two of the actors I’d got to know pretty well on the shoot, and we decided to go. I like to call them the Two Chrises. Chris’s? Chrisi? Anyway, they’re both called Chris. Now, Chris Rithin knows my friend Luke Kaile who wrote A Criminal Audition and Halfway House, and with whom I’m writing my webcom. Chris Edgerley knows Megan Affonso who will appear with Luke and I in Halfway House in June. I also knew that Sharon Lawrence would be there who was in a scene with me on Rules of Life. She shares an agent with Georgina Sherrington (star of The Worst Witch), whom I know from the Actors Centre.

I’m getting to the point.

When I turned up, I was greeted by a girl I’d never met, but who said she’d recognised me from imdb. Her name is Georgie Lee-Robinson, and we’d both provided voices for an upcoming animation called Tunstall. Also, it turns out her landlady is Miranda Rae who I shared a scene with in a film called scAIRcrows. Inside I spoke to another actress I’d never met called Natalie Barker who said her friend Peter Halpin had asked her if she knew me. I worked with Pete previously on Rules of Life.

Later on, having met the Two Chrises’s and Sharon, I got talking to Tricia Stewart who’d I’d never properly met but we’d both worked on Lee Nelson although in different scenes, and actually auditioned for the same sketch show pilot (Creative People) a few weeks ago.

I also had a chat with an actor named Stephen Mcleod  – we’d been paired up in a commercial audition last year some time, and had met somewhere else since but neither of us could remember.

Ridiculous isn’t it? I mean, really, really ridiculous. What’s even more crazy is that while driving back from Milton Keynes one afternoon (don’t ask) I realised I had actually met Natalie Barker before, at an audition last year where I was helping out by reading with the actors. The same auditions where a girl said she went to Drama School x and I said “oh, do you know so and so who I was in a play with?” and she said “yes I went out with him for 3 years”.

So basically, at that screening, seven of the cast I’d either worked with on a previous project, or they knew someone I’d worked with, or both.

It really is a small world isn’t it. Really, really, fucking small.