Episode 184: Career Coaching with David Cady

About David: DAVID CADY is currently a professor of commercial and musical theatre performance at AMDA, NYU, and Pace University. Prior, he was a casting director for Donna DeSeta Casting for close to 30 years. In addition to countless commercials, his casting credits include the original Dirty Dancing, Disney’s Enchanted, Michael John LaChiusa’s The Petrified Prince for the Public Theater, and the world premiere of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Jim Steinman’s Whistle Down the      Wind, directed by Harold Prince.   He was an original cast member of Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s Merrily We Roll Along, and can be seen in Lonny Price’s film about the experience, The Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened. Actors don't think like the rest of us. They have a very, very particular way of doing things, and that can lead to actors getting stuck. You need accountability. It's important for actors to engage with that other part of their brain and realize that it is a business.  It’s important that you do something for your career that makes you want to vomit in your mouth just a little bit every day. In order to be successful, you need to do things that push you out of your comfort zone. You need to do things that get you to that next bit, to that next level of success. It's such a competitive business, and every single actor is competing, and you are competing with yourself. It isn’t just about your talent. Your agent is probably not going to do much more than submit you for work. The misconception is that agents are going to mold your career. Actors are sensitive people, but, in David’s experience, agents, managers, and casting directors are not sensitive people. The first job is being the best actor that you can be and continuing to study and be in class and get better at what people are ultimately going to hire you to do. And then the second job is to learn how the business works. Understanding yourself is going to make you just a better craftsman, but it's also going to help you as a person get out of your way. If you don't understand what's holding you back, then it's just going to keep holding you back.  I think the people who are going to get furthest are the people who love it, love the work, who love writing letters, sending out pictures and resumes, and doing the mailings. They're jazzed by it. They're excited by it.  It’s about having the confidence to meet yourself before anybody else tells you that you're good.