This is so exciting! (And why I suck at acting)

Any moment now, Studio Fred will upload episode one of our new webseries MICHAEL PHELPS in SWIMKATA! I've seen the footage. It all looks great.

Well, almost all of it looks great. Seriously, 99% of it is awesome, but the best take we had of a mugger stealing the purse has me (playing a swim judge) just kind of staring into space like a dork. It was always a weird mis-en-scene. The mugger has to shove past me to get to the purse, and I do nothing so Phelps can swim in and save the day. But it's one of the those things where if I look surprised, no one's going to notice. (Hell, chances are, no one's going to notice anyway. That's kind of the purpose of an extra.)

See, this is why I suck at acting. Most of acting is not acting, not doing anything except waiting to act. Or, more precisely, being ready to act at any given moment. Well, I suck at purposeful waiting. My mind wanders. I start thinking of the reason why Kyle Rayner was a better Green Lantern than Hal Jordan, how glad I was that one scene in the DVD extras from THE HOST was cut from the film, why my wife's obsessed with our youngest daughter's height... and, well, next thing you know I'm being filmed, frantically asking myself how to act naturally, which is the last thing a person who is really acting naturally does.

Except the one scene in question, I didn't even do that. See, it's worse when it's a scene you've written. I'm so used to watching the scene from the dozens of times I've gone over it in my head that I forget to, you know, be in the scene. Which is what happened in the one take the director used for a purse snatching. Unless the director used another take in the final edit. I think there was this one take where I lift my hands in shock and surprise. Now that's acting, people.

--Andy