What a Career in Acting Can Look Like: Guest Article by Acting Alumna Kearsten Johansson
A career in acting most often doesn’t take the straight trajectory people sometimes think it does. The misconception is that an actor auditions for parts, lands the big role and makes their way to Hollywood.
But, one year after graduating from Toronto Film School’s Acting for Film, Television and the Theatre Diploma program and launching my acting career, I can tell you that working as an actor takes many different forms and can lead you down many different pathways: full of choices, chances and opportunities.
For example, as an actor you might have the opportunity to work with medical professionals on honing their bedside manner. Or, I recently auditioned to act out passages from a novel during a book-signing event.
As actors, our career depends on who we are as people and what we bring to our work from life experiences and the personal characteristics that make us unique.
Since graduating from Toronto Film School I have been hired as an actress with a travelling theatre company that performs shows all over the world. I have also been involved in six plays that were performed in downtown Toronto. I recently received a THEA Award, presented by ACT-CO Theatre Festival, for Elvis’s Toenail produced by the Toronto Irish Players.
Similarly, a month after graduating from Toronto Film School, Nicole Vezeau was nominated for a THEA Award for The Miracle Worker produced by the Little Oshawa Theatre.
A year after graduating, Carla Garcia continued her love of theatre at the Hamilton Fringe Festival in The Prickly Pear is Rising.
Friends of mine who also graduated from the acting program have gone onto some very different and exciting work, including Maria Chapovalova who was recently a contestant on Russia’s Next Top Model and Richard Maxwell who was featured in an episode of the television show Covert Affairs.
Mathieu Burdan and Chad Tailor have started their own film production company, which won a film trailer festival. And less than two weeks after graduating Jarrod Vanvolkenburg was signed with top agent, Norbert Abrams.
We are all doing different, but equally amazing things, because they allow us to do the one thing we all dream of as actors—create expressive works of art that move people.
Kearsten Johansson was the valedictorian of the 2014 Acting for Film, Television and the Theatre graduating class at Toronto Film School. She was also the recipient of the Best Actor Award at the Toronto Film School convocation.
