I Auditioned for an "Influencer" TV Commercial, and It Was the Most Awkward Thing That Ever Happened to Me
And it hopefully always will be
[As this post is a little more personal than usual, it’s for paid subscribers only. And as I am wordy, it’s also a little over 3,000 words long, so at least you’ll be getting your money’s worth. You can click the button below to upgrade or subscribe…]
Not long before the pandemic kicked off, and rendered stories like this one completely irrelevant for a while, I was invited to audition for a part in a TV commercial.
Now, trust me when I tell you, this was every bit as surprising to me as it probably is to you. Because the commercial was for a hair product, and, OK, sure, I have hair, certainly, but that was really all I had to recommend me for a hair product commercial. (And even that’s pushing it, if we’re being completely honest here.) Or any kind of commercial, for that matter.
I am not an actress.
I am not a model.
I’m not even a proper grown-up, I mean, SERIOUSLY.
No, I am — or was, at the time — a not-particularly-successful blogger/”influencer” who’d just had her first baby, lost a bunch of followers as a result, and was now going through a painful crisis-of-confidence while she wondered who she actually was now, and if she’d ever get back to being the person she still vaguely remembered from the times BC (Before Children).
(Spoiler alert: NO.)
It was the worst possible time for me to consider getting into the modeling/acting business, then: and yet, here I was, being encouraged to fly to London and audition anyway, by a really-quite insistent PR person/agent, who claimed I was just what the brand in question were looking for.