WEEK IS NO THE SAME

A Freelance Life In

The day our lives changed forever, I was taking a Saturday morning nursery class at a performing arts school in South-West London. My phone was plugged into the speakers to play music through. Suddenly, mid-parachute game, my ringtone sounds loudly. My friend X was calling. I immediately put my phone on aeroplane mode until the end of the class, and once all the children were safely redeposited, took it off again. Countless emojis of champagne popping, balloons and clapping hands swept over my phone screen from our friend group’s WhatsApp chat. I call X back. He’d got the part.

Four years out of Drama School, I was working ten part-time jobs to pay for half our room in a London flat: nanny, private tutor, teacher’s assistant, waitress, caterer, food-sampler, drama teacher, receptionist, dog-walker and… coordinator for a social-impact

LONDON

BY GEORGIE OULTON

award at the Edinburgh Festival (there’s no real job title for that). This is how I funded my dreams of working as an actor, producer, director, theatre company co-founder and writer.

My best-paid job was my first job in London aged eighteen – a children’s entertainer. I met my boss on a train. She had just started a children’s birthday party business, and I made up some rubbish on the spot about having a close eye for detail and a passion for performance. She gave me her card. For the next three months, I became her personal assistant and did parties on the weekends, dressed as everything from Princess Elsa to Mickey Mouse. The necessity of the job blinded me from the absurdity of commuting an hour out of London to fire off emails in a shed-turned-office at the bottom of her garden. However, I will always be grateful to her; she gave me my first chance.

I carried on doing the parties at weekends but got another weekday job as an office administrator at a film insurance company in Soho. I called my mum after my first day. They use a different language, Mum. Normal words mean different things. Like Premium. And Sum. I have literally no idea what they are talking about. Eventually, I got the hang of it. The job saw me through ten drama school auditions, and I finally gained a place that August. I trained for three years, fell in love and left feeling like a star ready to be born.

The truth is, we freelancing artists are like the rats of London. We’re everywhere. We’re racing around, often malnourished and grey of face, foraging free food at every chance we get. Typically, we’re the ones arriving everywhere with massive rucksacks filled with god knows what (Tupperware and phone chargers).

For a while, I lived in a house of four freelancing actors. We all signed up to the same food-sampling company. Food sampler definition: the people in food stores who offer free samples of food brands on promotion. The shifts are generally three hours long and pay around £12.50 p/hr. Not bad – particularly if you stack your shifts up. A big bonus, of course, is that you often went home with stacks of free, fancy snacks. Win.

You could tell who was an actor on the other stands a mile off. Something about the ‘sales’ element of the job seemed to scratch the dissatisfied itch to be seen and heard. The way their beautifully trained Shakespearean voices detailed exactly how kombucha was brewed gave them away instantly. I’d count down the minutes before another fellow food sampler would drop in that they’re actually an actor and just do this on the side. It’s a chronic problem amongst freelancing artists – the need to justify why we’re doing what we’re doing.

It became a sort of undercover secret union. We’d swap stories and seek advice on our varying career stages across stands on the Wholefoods shop floor. There were us regulars, who would celebrate when an audition came through one week, only to be greeted the following week by no news yet. We would come up with all sorts of reasons as to why this time, it was okay that it might not go our way, convincing one another that the right job was just around the corner.

Every so often, the station would be reallocated to someone new. They did get the job; they were on tour or off filming. No time for goodbyes. Faith and elation would be restored momentarily before the cold, harsh truth sunk in that I was still there on the stand, left behind, and my self-doubt would rumble.

When X received the email inviting him to audition for the life-changing role, he was dishing out beef jerky samples to strangers outside a Clapham Sainsbury’s with our friend, Tom. He read the email and laughed: Mate, look at this. There’s no way in hell. Cut to nine months later. We are living on the beach on the other side of the world: he is filming a huge-scale television show; I am writing plays, staging them and professionally acting. Both of us are living a version of happily ever after.

Now, back in London, we live in a new area and it feels like a brand new city. These days, our life is a hilarious set of contradictions. Fear not, though, the freelancing life didn’t get away. I found a local family to nanny for and catered events in between acting jobs. Nevertheless, I have more oxygen in the tank. A fresh perspective. I even volunteered at a florist on Valentine’s Day – for my story bank.

Recently, I worked a one-off freelance job for a billionaire’s club. This entailed ferrying high-net-worth individuals across Mayfair between restaurants, jewellery stores and conferences about how to make more money. I borrowed an outfit from a friend to achieve the PR stunt of seeming ‘together’. I assumed that food would be provided during the day – it wasn’t. By ten o’clock, I was starving. During the clients’ dessert course, I slipped away to Pret to pick up some soup and a bread roll. Card Declined. Red-cheeked, in my imposter outfit, I weighed up the necessity of the soup. The bread roll was only 75p, and the carbs would tide me over until I was home. I looked up at the sorry-looking server and then through the window to the restaurant where the billionaires were picking at their desserts. I couldn’t help but laugh.

Last week was the global premiere of X’s show in Leicester Square. In the weeks building up to it, he’s had interviews and photoshoots, stylists rolling into our modest flat with rows of designer clothes for him to try. On the red carpet, I stood next to him in an outfit entirely rented from Selfridges. Much like Cinderella, I returned everything the following morning, the illusion disappearing in a puff of smoke. Two days later I was back on reception, telling the girls all about it. Tomorrow I will be pushing someone else’s toddler on a swing, and Friday I film an episode in a long-running British television show.

Currently, I’m down to five jobs: running a small business from home offering support to other actors, nannying, temping, acting and writing. No week is the same. I still haven’t come up with an efficient way of invoicing, my website lies dormant waiting to be launched and doing my tax return continues to give me anxiety all year round. And yet, I feel genuine gratitude and enjoyment in my hodgepodge life.

I know that nothing is permanent; we cannot guarantee a thing, and with that comes a carpe diem attitude that gives meaning to my life. Every small win is celebrated. Being close to the glitz and glamour is fun to experience for an evening, and I am grateful for the grounding that helping a toddler walk gives me amidst all the madness. Above all, I adore our underground union of London freelancer rats that find treasure in the dustbins. We hold onto each other and, when the time comes, delight as each other moves on to new horizons. ✦