Home and Away stars offer their advice for hitting the big time!
Jodi Gordon [Martha]: If you wanna try and be an actor and get into this industry, have a go, there’s a place for everyone. Try your hardest, go get some acting lessons and give it a go, there’s no harm in trying!
Jason Smith [Robbie]: If you’re Sydney-based, there’s a place called Australian Theatre for Young People in Walsh Bay. Anyone from the age of seven to twenty-five can go. It’s where I went and I can’t speak highly enough of it. It’s great: you can do accents, you can do circus skills, drama, auditions. Nicole Kidman’s the ambassador for it, she funds part of it. Get some black and white headshots done, look in the papers, find a good agent and stick with it. If it’s meant to happen, it’ll happen!
Bobby Morley [Drew]: Trust your instincts and be really honest. Learn your lines but try not to think about it too much – trust your gut instincts. Even if you’re talking about aliens coming down from space – something that makes no sense at all – you’ve gotta connect that to an honest emotion. That’s the main thing I try and do. Trust the other actor and believe what they’re giving you.
Jessica Tovey [Belle]: I think drama is such a good thing for young kids to do. We all did drama and although none of my close friends actually want to be actors anymore, the social skills they learnt and the confidence skills that they’ve taken from the performance that they did have made them really well-spoken, really happy, confident people. I think that whether you want to do it for a career or not isn’t really important but you’ve gotta love it and throw yourself into it. At the end of the day, we’re all here having fun. We take serious scenes seriously but we’re all here because we just love doing it. It’s this hobby we managed to create a career out of, which for me is fantastic – I love the fact that what I do every day is what I love doing!
Indiana Evans [Maddie]: Join up with an agency, have patience and never stop learning.
Emily Perry [Zoë]: I think a lot of people want to become famous and don’t necessarily want to do good acting, so concentrate on your acting and everything else will come from that. Go and get classes - I do drop-in classes, I think that really helps an actor.
Amy Mathews [Rachel]: I think it’s important to be incredibly passionate about it because there are a lot of obstacles and trials that you have to hurdle. If you have a great support base around you and are ambitious and are thick-skinned, definitely go for it – you’d hate to regret not giving it a go.
Lynne McGranger [Irene]: Get all the experience in the world that you can. I had a lot of experience in community theatre in amateur theatre. Anything where you have to think on your feet: I’m a great advocate of theatresports, of improvisation. Go to theatre, support theatre, watch theatre and never be afraid to put up your hand and help with the slog, to help with front of house, to help with painting the sets. I was bought up in community theatre where everybody knuckled down and did everything. I helped nail the seats together at the original Q Theatre and I’m very proud of that. Get training, but for some people training is not the be-all and end-all. I did two years of training and I’m still working out what I learnt! I picked up a book by Uta Hagen and read it and went, ‘Oh, I get it! Now I get it!’. But I never got it at drama school.
