Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government job.
I'd quit my job at a production company and was like, 'I'm going to be a writer...' I became a temp, and it was the mid-nineties, when there was the Internet boom, and the normal group of graduates ready to fill in didn't exist.
I want a job where I work for eight months, then do nothing for four.
I delivered Chinese food on Long island, which is pretty depressing. I lived with my parents and did that for six months. I got a job a few towns over from mine so I wouldn't have to see people from my high school.
I started to walk the halls of HUD. I went into every office and every cubicle. I met a lot of people. I soon realized that they all realized that they were staying and I was going. It’s just that none of us knew when.
I got fired from a job years ago. It was an accounting job. They were basically trying to cut corners, so they employed a bunch of temps to do proper accounting. And it just caused absolute bedlam and I did get fired.
I didn't have a lot of great jobs. I was a third-shift legal proofreader. I did office work for people where a friend might say, 'Hey, we need someone,' in his office, and then I will have a month or two weeks or whatever somewhere. I was - I taught fiction workshops.
In the last years of the nineteen-eighties, I worked not at startups but at what might be called finish-downs. Tech companies that were dying would hire temps - college students and new graduates - to do what little was left of the work of the employees they'd laid off.
Nowadays, there's no such thing as a stable job.
Most adults get to a point in their careers where they feel secure, where they have a body of work behind them that will ensure longevity, and for actors, it's just not like that. You're basically always a temp, going from job to job.
The majority of them give the impression of being men who have been drafted into the job during a period of martial law and are only waiting for the end of the emergency to get back to a really congenial occupation such as slum demolition or debt collecting.
I was a temp secretary for a long time, and I went at it with a passion, and I tried to do a nice job in all my jobs.
I'm like this mercenary actor going from show to show - people love to hire me, but then don't want me around much.
For three months, when I was 23 years old, I worked as a clerk at Wandsworth Sewer.
I did not want to go anywhere where I would be interim.
I was adrift for a while. I worked as a substitute teacher; I sold cars.
The Renaissance was a time of mercenary soldiers, ours is a time of mercenary labor.
I have held the following jobs: office temp, ticket seller in movie theatre, cook in restaurant, nanny, and phone installer at the Super Bowl in New Orleans.
Before doing 'Darkplace' in 2003, I was temping and at call centres, and that was pretty bad. Then I was at the London Dungeon, which I loved doing, and then from that, I was on Channel 4 doing 'Darkplace.'
Unless you have a long-running series, most actors just go job to job if you're lucky to keep working. You just do a movie or a play or a TV thing, and it's over at some point.
Well, it's not full time - my dancers are only paid for six months of the year in two three-month blocks; but yes, it is possible we could do it in another year.
In today's world, most people are working side jobs while waiting to do what they really want to do.
After doing kid's television on CBBC and messing around with eight and nine year olds, there was a period of three years in the middle of that when I wasn't doing anything. I was working as a receptionist and in a pub; I was a cleaner and all sorts of things. All life has its ups and downs.
There were many things I could do for two or three days and earn enough money to live on for the rest of the month. By temperament I'm a vagabond and a tramp.
I spent years commuting into London when I was working as a temp, and I hated the monotony of it.
