How many actors are out there?

Last time I wrote about the difficulties associated with finding paid acting work, as made plain by data available from Actors Equity Association and the Screen Actors Guild on their membership employment and income. Today I want to write about why this is, and what you can do about it.

The searchable database on http://www.collegedata.com tells us that the United States currently contains 818 college-level programs that offer theatrical training. Obviously, this is not meant to account for all actors in this country—many either don’t attend college, attended a non-accredited conservatory program, received a Master’s Degree (the database is for undergrad programs) or trained overseas and then moved here. But it’s a start.

Let’s say that each of these 818 programs graduates 10 actors every year. That’s probably a conservative estimate, but we’ll go with it. My conservatory-style BFA program at a major university graduates 14 actors every year. I’ve heard of large universities with as many as fifty undergraduate actors in a single class.

Anyway, we’re talking 8,180 young actors every year, and like I said earlier, that excludes a significant number of would-be professional thespians pursuing alternative routes, and about which statistical data is not easily obtainable.

All actors have an “age range”—a general age group in which they are realistically marketable (18-22 years old, for example). This is usually five years but can sometimes be more than that. Let’s go with five. This means that, conservatively speaking, some 40,900 actors in the United States are in your age range. Granted, everybody has a different type, but even if there’s, say, twenty identifiable types in a given age range, that still leaves 2,045 actors per type. And even if you figure that only 1/3 of those actors are competing in your specific market (New York City or Los Angeles), it still means that every time you are up for a job some 680 other actors can be up for it too. I would like to reiterate again that these are conservative estimates!

A quick aside on type—the above example assumes that all types are evenly distributed. The reality is very different. If you’re a woman, for example, you will encounter more competition than if you are a man. If you’re a female in your early 20s, Caucasian with blonde hair, between 5’4” and 5’7”, guess what—you will have more competition than if you’re male, 6’4” with a chiseled physique and dark features. Those of you with less competition aren’t off the hook, though—less populated types are indicative of types with fewer available jobs. No matter who you are or what you look like, the bottom line is the same: the competition is numerous and fierce!

So what can you do about this? Like any other field, you need to set yourself apart from the competition as much as possible. The “silver bullet” is training. And I don’t just mean run-of-the-mill acting classes, I mean the entire spectrum—scene study, voice, movement, audition technique, on-camera, commercial, business & marketing, voice-over and stage combat, for starters. The more you invest in yourself, the more distance you put between yourself and the vast majority of your would-be competition.