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Recession Tips From a Sometimes Unemployed Actor

By Diane Farr Wednesday May 9, 2012

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Recession Tips From a Sometimes Unemployed Actor

I began auditioning for acting jobs at the ripe old age of twelve. Thirty years later, including a fifteen-year run on television, I sometimes just get offers for work. But at others I am still required to run, Pell Mell around Los Angeles or New York, interviewing for film and TV roles.

I’ve put in much more than the 10,000 hours Malcolm Gladwell suggests would make you an expert in any field – including the field of job interviewing – so perhaps my fellow underemployed Americans would appreciate a professional actor’s (read: continual interviewee’s) tips about keeping your confidence intact when hustling for work, as auditions are tougher than you might think.

An audition is actually the delivery of a full performance – without the benefit of props, costume, professional hair styling or make up. Or pay. It also must be delivered while balancing ten pages of script and seeming like your not just pretending while you are performing alongside someone who is just pretending as they just a hired “reader.” All this is done in front of a firing squad of hiring types who openly judge me as I pour my heart out with someone else’s words – which could easily crush your confidence.

Yet, that is not the spirit crushing part of my job interview. That’s just the “art” part.

Jet Blue-in’ It

By Diane Farr Wednesday May 9, 2012

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What exactly are the airlines doing to their flight staff?

Multiple theories abound about why stewardesses have replaced nuns in Catholic schools from the 1970’s as the forbidding people standing over you when you just want to go to the bathroom. The general attitude of the flying staff has gotten markedly and consistently harsher over the past decade, seemingly in direct relationship to their jobs becoming more militant. We’ve heard about the pay cuts, the longer hours, the shorter turnarounds for pilots and crew members. Which is enough to ruin morale for any employee.

Take Steven Slater, JetBlue steward who last year went on a cursing tirade over the loudspeaker and disembarked before the passengers by inflating the emergency slide and storming out of his twenty year career, on his backside, with a couple of beers from the flight deck in hand. Slater immediately came to my mind when I read about last week’s JetBlue pilot who had to be restrained by his own first officer and bolted outside the cockpit door after he began screaming about a bomb on the plane he was flying. Flight attendants and passengers had to hold him down while a passenger who happened to be a pilot made an emergency landing in Texas.

Why you have a crush on Jeremy Lin

By Diane Farr Monday February 27, 2012

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I hadn’t watched a basketball game since Patrick Ewing was kicking butt up and down a New York court. And even then, I was really only watching to see Pat Riley guide all the giant men under his watchful eye in the mid-’90s because he wore an Italian suit fabulously and I wanted him to pick me out the crowd and make me his leading lady.

Twenty years later, I’m watching Knicks games again for the newest star on the hardwood floor because, like the rest of America (and probably most of Asia), I’m totally charmed by Jeremy Lin’s story.

Why does so much of the world have a crush on Lin? Setting aside the whole “Asian thing” for a minute, here’re the top three reasons:

GOOD: What Do You Love: The Actress

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Actress and author Diane Farr’s new book, Kissing Outside the Lines, charts the personal and political challenges of entering an interracial marriage. This week in GOOD’s video series, What Do You Love, Farr takes us on a tour of the small stuff. Here are 10 little things she loves: 1 when the babysitter walks in [...]

Star Magazine: Q&A Diane Farr

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The Numb3rs star pens a hilarious memoir about the challenges that await a mixed-race couple. Love may conquer all, but that doesn’t make it any easier to win over strict Korean parents. In Kissing Outside the Lines, actress Diane Farr tells the humorous take of dating her histand-to-be, marketing executive Seung Yong Chung, sharing her [...]

Ranker: The Hottest Girls Of Californication

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Diane Farr Character: Jill Robinson, is a Grad Student/Teacher’s Assistant who meets Hank while having dinner at The Deanery. They end up going at it on top of the Dean’s desk in his home. Background: Diane Farr has written two books. The first, The Girl Code, was published in 2001 and has been translated into [...]

The Mentalist Taps Diane Farr, Bonnie Somerville, James Frain For February Sweeps

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Diane Farr can check another CBS procedural off her to-do list. The Numb3rs vet, who guest starred on CSI: Miami in October, will appear in an upcoming Season 4 episode of The Mentalist, TVLine has learned exclusively. Mentalist Scoop: Morena Baccarin Teases Her ‘Juicy’ Encore Farr will play Amy Barron, a Type-A, business-minded owner of [...]