Tim Minchin Graduation Speech

easiest are to follow so as a result I knew Dennis would be say something amazing so I made mine rhyme a little bit not properly just like free versi it's just and it's too long but like most of what I do it makes up in internal rhyme what it lacks in brevity and sorry it's a bit actor centric but I know a lot of your actors and I knew Dennis would talk about the other stuff so this is a poem I wrote yesterday called you've always wanted to be an actor you've always wanted to be an actor and your friends and you say to each other I want to act because I think storytelling is vital to culture or I want to act so I may hold up to society and mirror and there's truth in that but let's be honest you really want to act because it's really fun and you're quite like being clapped so so you go to drama school and you learn about shedding your skin and inhabiting your something something and you get your head screwed up by Stanislavski and then recalibrated by Mamet or the other way around and you learn to scuttle across a stage like a lizard and the core like a crow to let yourself go and to sing and tap and cry on cue and you make all your mistakes and have sex with your classmates and then you stop doing that and you learn to find the rhythm of the bard so every I am shines but doesn't Creek and you work really hard and change the way you speak and you become slowly aware of these relentless waves of self-confidence and self-loathing that come and come and come and you think the waves will smooth out when you have success but they don't and they won't so the only solution is to worry about them less just by the way so you graduate drama school and that's amazing brilliant amazing and as you should be you are proud and at the graduation stare meanie you watch two clowns standing on the set of their mutual fluke reading reading speeches that they wrote the day before and you think of these idiots can succeed anything is possible which is true in a way but not in a way that should necessarily give you confidence due to the randomness of well Dennis look at him God does clearly play dice with the universe and so off you go and you get an agent yippee and oh let's say just hypothetically you're really good-looking you're beautiful and you have been blessed let's say with hot jeans you stay slim easily you go to the gym easily you have those well spaced tires and high cheekbones and one of those lovely big mouths that kids seem to have these days and you've found that if you stand still in front of the camera and look just past the shoulder of the DOP and think about a cup of tea or a tricycle and the light hits your well-spaced eyes and your high cheekbones just perfectly then we the audience will read into your stillness grief or pride or piety Wow and you're also an amazing actor a truthful intelligent actor hard-working and skilled et Cie but that's not so much the point because beauty so you get a role in an indie film I mean first you do an advert for cheese and a co-op at the king's head which although you don't know it at the time will be the last year to board you ever tread and then a guest on Coronation Street yay and then an Archon Holby City hooray and then a supporting role in an independent film that ends up it can and is seen by a Rudin or of Einstein and gets distributed across the USA and so you sign with an agent at CAA and a manager at I don't know somewhere and they tell you that you should move to LA because you'll have more opportunities here but it's clearly because they won't get paid if you're doing a play at the National will they just by the way so you do you move to LA and you're sharing a bungalow in Silver Lake with a Canadian actress who thinks everything happens for a reason which you also believe because no one has ever pointed out to you that that is a stupid thing to think just by the way and as is the tradition you struggle for a year coffee shop job between auditions and then yes you get a well-paid job playing a sexual assault victim on two episodes of season 25 of Law & Order SVU and you buy an SUV and you move into a mid-century modern rental in West ho with a friend of a friend who has a band for banjos a cellist and a DJ who once played at Coachella and a YouTube vid of one of their audience members choking on a corn dog went viral so now they're quite popular and then yeah during your second pilot season in LA when you're missing the drizzly comfort of the UK spring and your mum's on the phone telling you to come home darling just come home your audition for a new NBC drama D for a character who doesn't see too much in the pilot but great script and sixteen great writers and they'll definitely write more for your character after the pilot so after six callbacks and weeks of anxiety and after being filmed with the star to test your chemistry you get offered the part and you little you bullied in high school for having spotty skin told by your primary teachers that you need to pull your head in and stop showing off little you who lived with four people in a flat in Wood Green and worked and worked on your crowd and you didn't you didn't give in you have a role in a us Network television pilot and you don't do not hesitate to sign the contract that says if it goes to series you will be committed 39 weeks a year for up to eight years and yeah they make the pilot and it gets picked up and it goes to series and so your week starts with a 4:30 a.m. pick up on a Monday and the crew is great and the cast is great and although half of your day is spent in your trailer and it's much more boring than you'd foreseen you're in pretty much every scene generally doing something with a computer slash Bunsen burner slash nonspecific screen in the background so you're always on set and inevitably by week's end production is falling behind six hours so you don't actually get off set for your weekend until 2:00 a.m. on a Saturday morning and you sleep all Saturday and on Sunday you learn your sides and reset rolling speed and action and that's fine because the series is a hit and you're on the telly and the newspapers in the UK write about you saying something you don't remember saying and the Daily Mail comments on your hair and your abs and your ass and when it goes to season 2 and the ratings go higher you get a pay rise and now you're making a million quid a year and you are proper famous and you are friends with proper famous people and you know Sandra and George and Bono and Elon Musk and you buy a fenced-in house in the hills with a pool and you're single but you know that's cool you find out how to meet people because you know they come to you with so many assumptions about who you are about your hair and your abs and your ass and then after season 3 when the shows not quite so hot in the ratings start to drop the network gets the writers to simplify the script cut expenses cut the complex bits and on they Forge churning out the EPS motivated by nothing but and every year the ratings go down a bit the show loses its edge a bit more the ideas get a bit more repetitive and your character is saying the same and you can't remember the last time you cared about a line the last time you expressed an idea that had any value whatsoever and one Sunday you have some of your famous frown friends around for a drink these beautiful kind generous Americans you do adore them but whom you always feel you can't quite reach personalities like a leftover pudding that has cling-wrap pulled so tight across the bowl that you don't notice it's there at all until you go to dig in and your spoon bounces off and so you're sitting by your pool with these kind cling film friends and the thought enters your head that you'd really like to walk down the street to have a drink at a pub but you can't because you're too famous to leave your house you can't leave your house this is not a warning to be clear if that becomes your story you'll be sweet I wrote that because in ten years when those of you who don't end up being nightly or Laurie or cumbers when you have done a hundred jobs and like the boxer you carry the reminder of every glove that blah blah blah and you've borne the slings and arrows of outrageous tweets I hope you remember that in our game success doesn't mean what they think it means and even if you get the type of success that they think is success it won't necessarily be for the best the people I knew at your age the folks with whom I built sets and rigged lights and acted and drank and dreamed they are everything mike is one of the finest drama teachers you would ever meet Jenny gathers the memories of the elderly and tells that turns them into plays and Brian makes puppets and Christine runs a theater company that tells stories of refugees and Tommy is a vet and Iggy makes music with Aboriginal elders and Taurasi as a mum and just Oh has a million children and paints and is a barrister oh you should hear his voice it would be like being defended by Leah and Toby's a pirate and Bek runs an events company and to state the obvious I observe among my friends no correlation between wealth and happiness or fame and Happiness the happy ones work hard generally and they are generous generally and they generate generally valuable ideas which is your job just by the way to put into the world valuable ideas so look for stories that are worth telling and lessons that need teaching and tell them and teach them and stay passionate and I'll see you at the pub lots of love you

Channel: MountviewLDN

Views: 154,485

Rating: 4.923913 out of 5

Keywords: Tim Minchin (Musical Artist), Mountview Academy Of Theatre Arts (Educational Institution), Matilda The Musical (Play), Actor (Profession), Acting (Website Category), Drama School (Organization), Comedian (Profession), Stand-up Comedy (TV Genre), Honorary Degree (Degree), University Of East Anglia (College/University), Doctorate (Degree), Theatre (TV Genre)

Id: rxqSJfrXHXM

Length: 10min 11sec (611 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 13 2015