I Am Extremely Suspicious of Normal People. Stay With Your Own Kind.

I am extremely suspicious of normal people.

They are devious. They lie.

Not because they are necessarily bad people. But because they have never been asked to examine themselves the way an actor is asked to examine themselves — completely, ruthlessly, without the comfort of pretending the ugly parts aren’t there. They have never had to find the truth inside themselves and put it on stage in front of strangers. They have never had to be wrong, and broken, and exposed, and then do it again the next night.

That changes a person. And the absence of it changes a person too.

Stay With Your Own Kind

My acting coach Ivana Chubbuck used to say it plainly: stay with your own kind.

I have thought about that for years. At first it sounds like a warning. Eventually you understand it is a kindness. Because actors are a different breed. Not better — different. We have different values, different tolerances, different ways of moving through the world. We are drawn to truth in a way that makes us genuinely strange to people who have organized their lives around comfort and appearances.

Normal people have different values. Not wrong values — different ones. They value stability, predictability, the smooth surface of things. Actors value what is underneath. We are professionally, constitutionally incapable of leaving the surface alone. We press on it. We look under it. We ask what is actually happening here, in this room, between these people, right now.

That is not a comfortable quality to be around if you are not built the same way.

The Honest Pretenders

Here is the paradox that normal people never quite understand: actors don’t pretend to be something they’re not. We do it honestly, on purpose, in service of a story. We know exactly what we are doing and why. 

The truly devious ones are the people who pretend without knowing they’re pretending. Who perform normalcy, perform goodness, perform reliability — and have done it so long they have forgotten it is a performance. Those are the ones to watch. Those are the ones I am suspicious of.

An actor who is playing a villain is safer than a normal person who has never examined whether they might be one.

The Harder, Realer, Stranger Path

This hoodie is for the ones who chose differently. Who said yes to the strange life, the examined life, the life that does not make sense to most people at most dinner tables. Who stayed with their own kind — not out of arrogance, but out of self-preservation and truth.

Wear it with full awareness of what you are.

TRUTH.

By M.V.K.