Photoplayer Hater

Acting is all fun for many. Lots actors do all they can to minimize anything perceived as a work, but they can only avoid the bad stuff for so long. These actors may be able to get by in class without doing a written back story for their characters or even without doing very much rehearsing on their own, but when they get a paying job on a movie or tv show they will find plenty of stuff they don't like that they will be forced to deal with.

Up Early, Stay Up Late

Film sets don't operate for your convenience. They don't open at 8 a.m. and close at 5 p.m. The emphasis is not on comfort or minimizing hassles. Film sets are all about capturing the footage they need for the finished movie in the cheapest way possible. This can manifest itself in shoots that began at 4 a.m. or can simply mean that the workday exceeds 12 hours. It may interfere with your social calendar or keep you away from other responsibilities. But this is the reality of screen acting.

Lack Of Rest

With call times requiring you to be on set before dawn it's clear when you're in a production you may not be able to get as much sleep as you would prefer. Not only will you sometimes not be able to sleep sufficiently the night before, you may not be able to take naps or otherwise compensate for it throughout the day. Production is expensive and many are under-funded and can't afford to add more days of production and rather just extend the hours they work in a day. Although union rules regulate how a producer can treat you, nonunion productions have no such requirements.

Extreme Conditions

Acting classes are well-ventilated, heated in the winter, and cooled in the summer. It's always comfortable in classrooms, but shooting on location isn't always so accommodating. There will be times when you will be shooting a summertime scene in the middle of winter due to budget and scheduling restrictions. You may find yourself in shorts and a tank top when it's 15° outside. Or you may be in a situation where the location is an old building and quickly reaches upwards of 100° a few minutes after the lights are turned on. You aren't going to be coddled the way you are in school.

Public Embarrassment

In class or in theater productions, anything you do will be seen by a finite amount of people. As soon as you get lucky and are in a movie, any compromising position you were in to play your character will be see everywhere. Whereas before only friends and family were a witness to your antics, now there are thousands of strangers also seeing your work and they may not be so complimentary. With the internet once a movie is released into the world, it can't be taken back. So will your part in it.

Homework, Research

Some actors like to take roles that are already familiar to them, while others are always looking for something new. If you are lazy and only looking for a good time, you likely only gravitate toward roles that you can do without much effort involved. Unfortunately the number of roles in the world that you can play without breaking a sweat are limited. There will inevitably come a time when you need to know things that you don't now know and this will require the skills you have thus far ignored.

Drastic Physical Changes

You don't have to be fat to be in a position to need to lose weight for a role. Film and video just tend to make all of us look heavier. Even the skinniest among us may need to shed a few pounds for a role. In some circumstances gaining weight is what's necessary. In acting class or less demanding roles this is rarely a requirement, but to open up yourself to more opportunities you will have to take seriously going through physical changes to better play a character or even get the role in the first place.

If you are a lazy actor, you're setting yourself up for a major confrontation sometime down the road. Your work habits are going to meet squarely against the realities of screen acting. If you find acting and all its facets to not be fulfilling for yourself, don't just take the parts you like and hope the others go away. Think deeply about whether or not this is really the thing for you to be doing if you can't take the good with the bad, because there's no way to separate them.