May 01, 2008

There's an old exchange that goes something like this: "I'm an actor." "Oh yeah? Which restaurant?" It never fails to elicit guffaws among those who aren't actors. For a long time, though, waiting tables was the mainstay of the acting profession. Modern times, however, have brought a wider range of possibilities for work between gigs. These days many actors support themselves by working in the fitness field. Survey the trainers at any Los Angeles or New York City fitness facility, and chances are many of them have headshots in their lockers.

 

A number of things make this type of employment a good fit for actors. "The thing that's interesting about it as a job is that it creates an opportunity for an actor to feel like they're their own boss," says L.A. actor and Pilates instructor Jenifer Kingsley. "And I think in a city where people really like to demean actors for having a day job, there's something very empowering about being in a job where you're setting your own schedule, you're setting your own rate, you're very much in control of your destiny." Actor and personal trainer Chris Damiano finds that his training schedule meshes perfectly with his audition schedule. "I'm able to pretty much stop my training at 11 or 12," he says. "I'll have two to three auditions in the middle of the day. By 4 o'clock I'm back, training my people again. So that's a great plus for us [actors]."

 

And what if they book the job they're auditioning for? No problem. Most clients are willing to be flexible — pardon the pun — when their hyphenated trainers book acting work. This is especially so in cities where most of the population understands how an actor's schedule works, with the occasional need to reschedule.

 

Down Dogs and Barking Dogs

 

Actor and standup comic Stella Valente started practicing yoga as a way of reducing stress. Her instructor noticed her natural affinity for the discipline and suggested she start teaching. Ready to quit her bartending gig, she took teacher training, studied tapes, and eventually became a yoga instructor, with three loyal students. Now, 10 years later, she's a high-level teacher, training celebrities, doing regular segments for Fox 11 news, and even teaching other teachers. She loves it. "Not only am I helping people to live their lives better but I'm reaching out to the community," says Valente.

 

But before you rush out and get business cards made, you should know that getting into fitness work involves more than looking good in sweats. "In order to do it," cautions Valente, "you have to really love it, because it takes a while to get good at it. And it's not amazing money, especially in this town [L.A.]. I made more money teaching yoga 10 years ago than I do now, because there's such a glut of teachers here. And yoga used to be a specialty." Now, she says, so many actors are yoga teachers that it has become a cliché.

 

And it takes training to be a trainer. Says Damiano, "I've seen too many people who come out here who are athletes, who have had great training but are not necessarily good trainers. Since I started personal training out here, I've seen an incredible influx of people who are brand-new to L.A. who go out and get this Cracker Jack certification, and then they start training people. But you see these [trainers] doing things that could potentially really hurt somebody."

 

To do it right, he says, personal trainers must get nationally certified through one of several organizations — such as American Fitness Professionals and Associates, the International Sports Sciences Association, and the National Academy of Sports Medicine. "They send you textbooks," says Damiano. "You have to do workbooks. You have to take courses. Then you have to take the test, and they only do it once a year. It's not a walk in the park. You need a background in it — an understanding of kinesiology, physiology. You take anatomy, and that incorporates physiology, the skeletal system, all the different systems of the body — circulatory, endocrine, all that."

 

It's also far more time-consuming than your average support gig is. "It's my other business," says Valente. "It's not like going into a waiting job, where you just go in, you do it, you leave. And so in that respect it does take a little more time."

 

Three, Two, One, Contacts!

 

On the plus side, a number of the fitness folks interviewed for this article agreed that it's a good field for making industry contacts and can sometimes lead to fitness-related acting work. Says Damiano, "You're working with the heart of the industry, because here everybody wants to be in the gym." A friend of his booked 12 weeks on a major motion picture because said friend trains a well-known actor. "You've got to know when to make your move, and a lot of times people don't know that and they shoot themselves in the foot. You've got to be very careful about that. But you're very close to the pulse of things."

 

What's more, casting people are sometimes looking for trainers to play roles. According to Kingsley, the actor who played Darth Vader in the Star Wars films, David Prowse, was originally a weightlifter. "Somebody knew him from working out at a gym, and hence, a career was born," notes Kingsley. These days, she says, there are even more opportunities for actor-trainers to combine those two disciplines by doing fitness DVDs, even fitness reality shows. "Some actors are okay with [reality] and some are not, but I know a couple of actors who have actually gotten a lot of work," says Kingsley.

 

Valente concurs: "I've made so many contacts through yoga. I've taught the head of HBO, the head of Fox Sports — they're all my students. And I may be doing a reality show. The producer, a student in my class, wanted me to be in the show. These days, Hollywood just promotes people who have a name. So if people know who you are, you can parlay it into a lot of different things."

 

New York performer Alli Foss loves her relatively new support job as a yoga instructor. "I knew I would like teaching. I always knew I was a teacher. But I never knew what I wanted to teach," she says. "I started working behind a desk at a yoga studio a year ago. I'd taken yoga on and off, and I'd always been a dancer, but they said they would sponsor me through a teacher-training program for Vinyasa yoga. So I did the teacher-training program, which was three months, 200 hours. And I didn't really know what I was going to do with it, because I didn't know how readily available yoga work was. And it immediately started to fall in my lap. I got some private clients and some classes, and I started assisting one of my favorite teachers, and it's just kind of gone from there. And because I enjoy doing it, not having acting work isn't the end of the world. It's fun. And I would gladly [teach] yoga on my next job to other actors. My dream life is to be a yoga teacher and an actor."

 

Some actors find they enjoy their fitness job so much that it becomes their new passion, sometimes even their new career. That's what happened for Pilates instructor Jack Hayes, who currently appears on Broadway in The Phantom of the Opera. Pilates isn't a support job for him; it's a transitional business. "Once I have enough clients up and running," he says, "I'm going to segue out of the theatre, because it's been 23 years, eight shows a week, six days a week. I'm very lucky having had a career in theatre, but the grind of that, physically, is something that I need to let go."

 

Moving On

 

Hayes got into Pilates as a means of rehabilitation after his second shoulder injury. He saw how valuable it could be, for rehab and as injury prevention. "When I realized I had this wealth of information, being a Broadway dancer for years, it was a natural fit for me," he says. "So I started the schooling last October. I'm about to test out to get certified, and I've opened up my own studio, Jack Hayes Pilates, on the Upper West Side in Manhattan."

 

And so for some, it seems, there's fate involved. "It's a surprise that it might become the next phase of your life," says Hayes. "Isn't it interesting? You want to talk about callings, and you can go into fate or whatever: Never would I have been in Pilates had I not had this theatre career and then got injured — something leads me to it, and here I am talking to you about another job. It's an unexpected path, and you kind of open yourself up to it." Though fitness may not be every actor's dream job, for many it beats waiting tables. Of course, just as with acting, it takes training and dedication to make it pay off. But with its current popularity as a support gig, the new punch line could easily be, "Oh, you're an actor? Which gym?"