I’VE been asked what an audition is like and as I had one last week and another coming up, I thought I’d write about that.

A career in acting isn’t about being famous, it’s about hard work and it takes time, determination, dedication, stamina and a solid will to never give up.

You also have to be thick skinned. It’s a business filled with rejection and flooded with competition.

However, it can also be very rewarding.

It can be very well paid and you get to meet and work with some amazing and talented people.

Watching actors like Tom Hardy work, as I did on Peaky Blinders, is an amazing opportunity to grow as an actor.

It’s exciting to become someone else for a day, to live in someone else’s shoes and to express your own real emotions but under imaginary circumstances.

After studying method acting both in England and New York, I started out doing ‘extra’ or ‘background’ work.

I have progressed to being a professional actor, which means I have an agent and I am a member of Equity and Spotlight and regularly get casting calls for auditions in front of some of the top casting directors in the country.

I’ve even recently had a Skype audition with a casting director in the USA!

Some of my first speaking roles were cut, as often happens when editing, but I still gained valuable experience.

As an actor, you can wait weeks, months or years for your next role and a lot of actors are ‘resting’ in between, but I keep busy working, doing an outdoor manual job.

As an actor, I have acted for corporate training videos and ‘read throughs’, where I go and read the part of an actor who can’t attend the read through.

I have also acted in some ‘pilot’ series. There are lots of avenues for an actor to work, it doesn’t all have to be on the big screen, but it’s all great experience

To get an audition, my agent scans through casting calls to find suitable roles and submits my CV and headshot to the casting director, who then requests a self-tape or invites me to audition.

An audition starts when you walk into the office. There are usually several other actors in the waiting room. You must stay calm and have faith in your abilities.

When you’re called through to the room there is a camera set up and two or three people behind a desk giving you instructions.

It’s all over quite quickly. Then all you can do is say thank you and wait!

There’s no such thing as overnight success, but years of hard work.

I’m putting the hard work in and hopefully the bigger roles will come soon!