A Bumpy First Day
How a hobby saved my career and well being.
When you’re growing up, you go through many hobby phases. Stickers, dinosaurs, stamps, the latest toys (Transformers, MASK & Ninja Turtles being personal favourites), but eventually you grow out of them and move on to other things.
For me, one hobby I never grew out of was wrestling. Not including the occasional viewing of Big Daddy & Giant Haystacks on 80’s ITV, my passion for it began with my cousin making me watch WWF on Sky in 1991. Seeing muscled up behemoths with face paint and spiked shoulder pads was a striking image for me and over the years, rather than leaving it behind, I find myself never being able to lose my enjoyment of it.
Whenever I let people know of my fondness for wrestling (which is quite rare), I often get one response: “You know it’s fake, right?” My answer: “Yes — so is Eastenders”. I then tell them what I enjoy about it — the storytelling, the characters, the athleticism; things that I learned to appreciate more as time went on. My passion evolved to watching different wrestling from across the world online and, in recent years, I’ve seen live shows from British promotions.
While I never ever thought of being a wrestler myself, I still sought out the secrets of how they do what they do. One big thing is learning to fall. Taking a “bump” means falling on your back as flat as you can, arms out, chin tucked in. The chin tucking is very important so as not to hit your head.
Why am I telling you all this? Well it was this knowledge that helped me during my first day as a professional actor.
The first time I was ever paid to act was for a 10 month tour of schools in Germany. We rehearsed three different plays over three weeks. Each play was written for different stages of learning English and on the first day of tour my group performed all three at the same school. We were on a huge stage at the end of a massive school hall. Despite the depth of the stage, we performed on a platform of wooden pallets extended from the concrete stage, mostly for sound and lighting reasons.
In the second play, I played a teenager who would go through some issues in the story. However I wasn’t to know the issues I was about to go through!
Our staging involved us using a huge wooden box, which we moved around the stage area for various platforms and effects. The start of the play involved me jumping up onto the box and saying the line “Part 1: My Birth”. I sat on the box, another cast member, who played my mother, would stand over me and the remaining two actors would pull me through her legs as if I was being born. A strange enactment of the miracle of birth, but the audiences loved it!
On this first show however, the leg pullers got a little bit over exuberant. Instead of settling on the edge of the box in a seated position, I found myself with my legs being held with nothing under me and I was heading downwards!
In that split second, I remembered the only thing I knew about falling safely — how wrestlers did it: flat back, arms out, chin tucked! BOOM! The noise of my back hitting the wooden pallet stage made the entire audience collectively groan, while my acting colleagues froze with fear. However, I managed to sit myself up, wearily say my next line and carried on as if nothing had happened. I’m not sure I would have done had I hit the concrete part of the stage!
You always remember your first professional show and I certainly have my reasons to remember mine. Different country, performing in a non-local language, and taking a huge bump at the start of the show. I always consider that my hobby saved my career and well being that day.
I wouldn’t want to do it again though.
