Most people hate their jobs. This is a sad, unfortunate fact of life. But it happens to be an eternal truth. Throughout the course of human history the overwhelmingly bulk of mankind has toiled to live, rather than having the good fortune to follow their dreams. Even when this is the case, when people elect to pursue an artistic, literary, journalistic or thespian vocation, their lives still consist for the most part of drudgery, penury, rejection and disappointment.
Jared Harris says that people in his profession need to take parts they don’t love if they ‘have bills to pay’
So we should welcome the intervention by the actor Jared Harris, who says that people in his profession need to take the parts they don’t love if they ‘have bills to pay’. Speaking of his decision to star in Marvel’s much-maligned movie Morbius, the Bafa-winning star, 63, tells this week’s Radio Times that it’s ‘quite rare that something comes along that ticks all the boxes’. He made that particular decision out of the need to pay off his mortgage:
‘You’ve got bills to pay. You’ve got people you have to look after.’ Securing a role in the iconic TV series Mad Men was a fortuitous one-off, he elaborates, an exceptional event that saw him land a ‘great part with a great director’, in something well-written and seen by many. ‘Maybe three times in your whole career it’s going to be something like that, if you’re lucky.’
It says something of unrealistic employment expectations today that Harris’s disclosure warranted a news story in itself; it was picked up by the Daily Telegraph, while he made the same ‘confession’ to the i paper last September, about the straitened financial circumstances that impelled him to take that fantasy role.
Yet this revelation will strike no veteran freelancer as remotely newsworthy. Taking on jobs to pay the bills is what self-employed professionals do, and actors have forever taken on roles beneath them. Sometimes they don’t even need to, yet in conducting themselves in accordance with professional duty and habit, many find unlikely success in unexpected fields and among new audiences. To me and my late-Generation X contemporaries Alec Guinness was forever Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars, while Sir Patrick Stewart is Captain Picard from Star Trek: The Next Generation. There’s nothing remarkable or novel about a respected thespian venturing into the gaudy universe of science-fiction and fantasy.
Yet the insinuation that Jared Harris has demeaned himself artistically by doing so has occurred in an age in which many suffer from the delusion that they can follow their heart’s desires, adhering authentically to dreams untainted by commercialism. Harris may have temporarily transported himself into a fantasy Marvel universe, but generations now have been encouraged to live in fantasy worlds of their own. For decades, we have seen the evolution and dissemination of the delusory self-help philosophy that ‘you can do anything if you put your mind to it’, a mantra that for the vast majority will result in an brutal crashing back down to earth.
This late-20th century myth of unbounded human potential has become even more phantasmagoric in a 21st-century world apparently teeming with successful ‘creative types’ and influencers, an ostensible plethora which has given added weight to the chimera that enjoying your job should be your goal and expectation. Even the current Employment Rights Bill, containing its notorious crackdown on ‘banter’ and offensive overheard remarks, rests on the assumption that the workplace should be an enriching environment in which all discomfort and unpleasantness is banished.
Yet working for a living is largely an inherently unpleasant and demeaning affair, even for those in the public eye who it is assumed everything is fine and dandy. When the actor Michael Madsen died last week aged 67, the obituaries reminded us of the cult status he attained in portraying the sadistic Mr Blonde in Reservoir Dogs. Yet the newspapers also recalled the series of forgettable roles he subsequently took out of necessity:
‘People forget that sometimes you have to pay the mortgage, sometimes you have to put your kids through school. You can’t always pick the greatest script.’
Madsen simply followed in the footsteps of such thespian titans as Richard Burton, who famously followed the path of base expedience after his heyday in the 1960s, a trajectory that culminated in his appearance in Exorcist II (1977), regarded as one of the worst films ever, or less egregiously Maggie Smith, who said of her appearances in Downton Abbey and the Harry Potter films that they weren’t ‘really acting’ roles and not ‘what you’d call satisfying’.
On balance, ‘not satisfying’ is probably the median assessment everyone in the world has about their job. Taking less than ideal assignments is what all self-employed professionals do, and in this respect Jared Harris has dispensed a timely, exemplary lesson for our often indolent and misguided youth: earning a living mostly isn’t fun.
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