Passion and Ambition — A Confession
- 3 days ago
- 25 min read
For years I've said it as a self deprecating a joke — I have enormous passion for the work, I have no ambition — and people laughed, and I laughed with them. I then recently I heard a colleague who I respect very much say something similar - so I decided to find out if it was actually true in myself. What follows is my answer.
Somewhere early in most artistic careers, someone tells you that you need to be hungry. I agree. You do need to be hungry — hungry for the art, and hungry to be an artist in this industry. What I believe has happened over time, though, is that this idea of hunger has become more and more about ambition. The ones who make it are the most ambitious ones in the room. The ones who want it most — who chase it hardest, who never take their eye off the prize.
I don't buy it. I never have.
While researching this article I found the etymology of ambition worth sharing. In ancient Rome, candidates for public office did what modern candidates still do — they went around the city urging citizens to vote for them. The Latin for this effort was ambitio, from ambire, meaning to go around. Driven by a desire for honour or power, the word came to mean exactly that. It passed into French and English as ambition in the late Middle Ages. It has always been about seeking approval, accumulating votes. Always outward-facing. Always directed not at the work, but at what other people think of you.
The word has barely changed. Neither has the behaviour it describes. But the scale of it has. And the speed.
Celebrity culture — supercharged by social media — has taken that same outward-facing hunger and magnified it beyond anything the ancient Romans could have imagined. Fame has become the measure. Visibility, followers, the personal brand, the recognition. A career is now routinely measured not against the quality of the work but against the size of the profile. The campaign machinery behind the Academy Awards — months of lobbying, strategic appearances, and calculated narrative-building — reveals just how detached recognition can be from the work itself. The best performance at the Oscars is frequently the campaign. Yet we still talk about films and performances in terms of 'it's an Academy Award winner'. What this has produced, in far too many young and established artists I fear, is an ambition that isn't even directed at the craft. It's directed at the image. That is more dangerous than the drive for roles and recognition — because at least that drive never lost sight of the work. This one has looked away entirely. I have sat across from actors who know their follower count to the nearest dozen but cannot hold a scene for thirty seconds. Walk into many gatherings of young actors and listen to the conversation. Getting the job. Who got cast. Who didn't. Is there a job for me. The work itself is rarely what's being discussed. And worse still, the celebration of others is becoming rare. I find it self-centred in a way that quietly limits everyone in the room and sets up an underlying competitive atmosphere that is counter-productive to us as a community.
The problem is not the hunger. The problem is where the hunger is pointed.
Ambition is an orientation toward outcomes you can't control. It requires the industry to keep moving in your direction to sustain itself. When the industry stops — and it stops, periodically, for everyone — ambition has nothing left to feed on. It turns inward. It becomes anxiety, resentment, the quiet erosion of self-belief. I came across the work of psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, whose work on flow and intrinsic motivation is directly relevant here. He spent decades studying what he called flow — the state of complete absorption in a task — and arrived at a distinction that maps directly onto this. Extrinsic motivation, he found, the kind directed at external reward and recognition, consistently undermines sustained creative performance. When the reward disappears, the motivation disappears with it. Intrinsic motivation — doing the work because the work itself demands it — doesn't depend on anything outside the room. It is self-sustaining in a way that ambition never is. His research shows that the best creative moments occur when a person is stretched to their limits in a voluntary effort toward something worthwhile. The word that matters is voluntary. Not because someone is watching. Not because the industry is paying attention. Because you chose it.
It is a pattern that repeats itself over time. The actor certain they were on the verge of the breakthrough. The director measuring every project against where they thought they should be by now. People of real talent grinding themselves down against an industry that was simply not, at that moment, paying attention. The industry's indifference was not a judgement on their ability. It never is. But ambition made it feel like one. I have felt it myself — the creeping measurement, the quiet resentment when the work wasn't being noticed the way I thought it deserved. I have watched it in others, talked about it, seen it up close, been hurt by it, and eventually — with enough distance — laughed about it. It is not a good place to work from and can be harmful to your mental health.
I often tell students: don't ask, "Did you like the show?" or "Did you like my performance?". Ask, "Did you have a good time?" It shifts the focus. Away from approval. Back toward experience.
What I have come to understand, through that experience and through watching it repeat in others, is that one of the most important skills an artist can develop is the ability to recognise where ego is getting in the way of thriving. Not to eliminate it — ego in some form is part of the instrument — but to see it clearly enough that it stops making decisions on your behalf. The resentment, the measurement, the quiet bitterness — none of it has anything to do with the work. It is the ego, afraid of being ignored.
Passion is something else. It's an orientation toward the work itself — the making, the learning, the inhabiting of a character as an actor, the shaping of a world as a director, the service to a story in whatever form the work takes. Passion doesn't need the industry to be in a good mood. It doesn't need a callback or a commission or an audience. It needs only that you keep working.
A career as an artist is not a ladder with a destination at the top. I believe that most hierarchical structures in our industry are horizontal rather than vertical — it is a wide, flat world of collaboration, relationship, and lateral movement, not a climb toward a fixed point above. And if not, it should be. When I was younger I believed otherwise.
The closest thing to a ladder I have ever experienced is the old adage — you are only as good as your last job. That anxiety is real and I have felt it. But it is still the wrong image. It measures backward rather than forward, and it measures against the industry's memory rather than your own development. Neither acting nor directing feels like a rung to me. Both feel more like a practice — one that deepens the longer you stay honest about what the work is actually asking of you.
I've argued for passion as the sustaining force. I stand by that. But I'd be doing the reader a disservice if I left it there, because passion without its counterweight is not the virtue I've been describing.
Passion without discipline is self-indulgence. We've all seen it. The actor so in love with their own process that they arrive unprepared and call it being present. The director so consumed by their vision that they stop hearing what the actors are discovering. These are not failures of ambition. They are failures of passion — passion running without the rigour that turns raw feeling into something that can actually reach another person. Left unchecked, which I have been guilty of in the past, it makes it hard to see the work as it truly is. You start to take every outcome personally. It breeds impatience — a constant push for results that cuts across the slow demands of craft. At its worst, it turns into obsession, wearing down relationships, health, and perspective until the work has damaged the very instrument it depends on. Starve the life and eventually you starve the art.
So the question is not whether passion matters — it does, profoundly — but how passion and discipline live together. How you keep the fire going without letting it burn the house down.
My answer, tested through practice: discipline is not the opposite of passion. It is passion's infrastructure.
Discipline means showing up. It means doing the preparation so that when you walk into the room you are genuinely free. An actor who hasn't learned the lines can't truly listen. The undisciplined artist mistakes chaos for freedom and busyness for work. The disciplined artist builds the container so the passion has somewhere to go. What I have never understood is the resistance to preparation — it is what makes freedom possible, and one of the greatest pleasures of the work. Learning your lines is not a limitation. It is the minimum requirement for showing up.
Every serious acting methodology points in the same direction on this. They differ in approach and vocabulary but not in the fundamental demand: do the work first. The feeling is not the starting point. It is what arrives when the work is done properly. Of all the methodologies I have encountered — and across forty years you encounter many, and you develop your own — the principle that sits closest to what I understand to be true in practice came from Meisner. Not because it is the most sophisticated — it may be the simplest — but because it is the most ruthlessly honest about where acting actually lives. It does not live in you. It lives between you and the other person.
Meisner built his entire approach on that single, uncompromising premise: you are not the source of the work, the relationship is. Which means the discipline is not about accessing your own feeling — it is about being available to what the other actor is doing, right now, in this moment. That availability is not a natural state. It is an achievement. It has to be built and protected against every instinct that pulls the actor back into their own head. You cannot perform genuine listening. You can only do it. And when you do — when the actor opposite you stops being a cue delivery system and becomes a person you are actually in contact with — the feeling arrives without being summoned. Discipline generates it. Not constraint. Presence.
There is a reason for this that I have come to understand through practice rather than theory. When the work is genuinely demanding — when the investigation is alive enough to absorb the actor completely — the ego has nowhere left to stand. The rigour eradicates it. Not by confronting it directly, which tends only to harden it, but by making the work so absorbing that self-monitoring becomes impossible. The actor stops watching themselves and starts doing the thing. That shift — from the performance of acting to the act itself — is where the joy lives. It was always there. The ego was in the way. Discipline is what removes it.
The periods of my career I look back on with most satisfaction were not the ones where I felt most passionate. They were the ones where passion and discipline were most fully integrated — where I arrived prepared enough to be present, structured enough to be free, committed enough to be surprised.
Discipline is what you do before the passion arrives. It is also what you do when the passion doesn't.
I teach. I have taught for most of my professional life — once I knew enough through experience to do so. And what I observe in training rooms now is different from what I observed when I began. Not in the quality of raw talent — there is as much of that as there has ever been. But in something harder to name. A restlessness. An attention that keeps sliding toward how this is going to look, rather than settling into what it actually is.
I want to be careful here not to suggest that all celebrity is corrosive. Early in my pre-career life, I had the great fortune of meeting Jill Perryman. I was a doorman, ripping tickets at the entrance to the theatre. In Australian theatre terms, Jill is a genuine celebrity — whose name carries the same weight that Patti LuPone carries on Broadway — extraordinarily accomplished, beloved by audiences and the industry alike across decades. What I noticed very quickly was that the love she received was not simply a response to her talent. It was a response to who she is. Jill is humble in her talent. She connects with people as human beings, not as fans. Jill asked me my name as she entered the theatre, and she never forgot it — through my student days at WAAPA, through to my professional life. A very dear friend of mine — someone with no professional connection to the industry — happened to meet Jill with me at a function. From that day forward, Jill never forgot her name either. Every time their paths crossed, she asked after her wellbeing. Not as performance. Not as the celebrity being gracious to a civilian. As one person genuinely interested in another. That is the distinction that matters. Jill's talent for celebrity — if we can even call it that — is that she is interested rather than merely trying to be interesting. That orientation, directed outward rather than inward, is precisely what celebrity culture in its current form destroys.
I'll declare my own position here. My relationship with visibility has always been complicated, and often at odds with industry expectations. My privacy is my own — I have never wanted my private life on public display, and I am genuinely glad I grew up without social media — before it became an expectation rather than a choice. What concerns me most about the world young people now navigate is not just the pressure to be visible, but that privacy itself has become almost impossible. Their adventures, their mistakes, their learning — all of it on display, or at risk of being displayed without their knowledge or consent. That is a loss I mourn for them.
As far as my career goes, I have always only enjoyed the celebration of the work. I have never sought celebrity. I am conscious that this can be detrimental — producers want to promote directors as personalities, and there is a box office logic to it that I understand. But I have always found the rewards of celebrity either delusional or simply not wanted in my life. Acting carries a specific vulnerability to this — the actor's face is the product, the instrument is also the brand — and it is one of the reasons I did not miss performing once I was solely focused on directing. Not because I stopped loving the work. Because I stopped wanting what came with the visibility of it, and the effort required to achieve it.
I have witnessed something in casting processes that I find genuinely troubling. An actor's follower count is now, in some rooms, a legitimate consideration in whether they are offered a role. Not their training. Not their range. Not what they did the last time they stood in front of an audience. Their numbers. I have seen talented actors — people with real craft, real presence, real ability to carry a scene — passed over because their social media following was considered insufficient. That is not the industry making a pragmatic commercial decision. That is the industry having lost its way. It is a blatant display of a world that has decided to care more about metrics than about people. More about reach than about talent. And it does damage — not just to the actors who miss out, but to the work itself, which is quietly being shaped by the same values that are emptying the rehearsal room of genuine presence. In advertising, it is even more appalling — the client cares more about the reach of posts than the quality of the talent selling the product — the actor. It is another reason actors must see advertising for what it is — an opportunity to pay rent.
What this looks like in the rehearsal room is not rudeness or ego — it is something quieter and harder to name. The actor is present, willing, working. But there is a part of them that will not fully arrive. They are listening for their cue rather than listening to their partner. The tells are small: the fractional withdrawal before the other actor has finished speaking, the pause for a breath when they receive their cue rather than the breath being in reaction to what they hear, the performance that is technically accomplished but somehow sealed, the energy that comes toward the room but never quite surrenders to it. Celebrity culture has trained them to manage their image in real time. Even in a rehearsal room, even with no audience present, some part of them is watching how this looks.
This is precisely why I have never liked mirrors in the rehearsal room.
The antidote is what it has always been. You bring young artists into contact with work demanding enough that the part of them that's watching how it looks has no oxygen left to breathe. A scene that won't yield to a surface reading. A partner who is completely present. In contact with that kind of work, the actor who has been performing being an artist will begin to feel the difference between performing and being. Once felt, it becomes a reference point they can return to.
Passion pulls you into the work and lets the watching self go. Ambition keeps the watching self in the room, measuring and comparing. Celebrity culture has fed ambition and starved passion. Good training reverses that.
Here is where I need to be careful. Because the argument I have been making — that ambition is the wrong orientation for a sustained artistic life — is easily misread as an argument against wanting things. It isn't. Wanting is not the problem. The problem is what you point the wanting at.
The confusion is easy to make because both feel like wanting. Ambition says: I need to play Hamlet because it will mean something for my career. Desire says: I need to play Hamlet because something in that text is pulling at something in me I don't yet fully understand. From the outside those two statements look identical. From the inside they are nothing alike. Ambition is oriented toward the result. Desire is oriented toward the encounter. The damage comes when you follow ambition into a room and call it desire — when you take the job because it is the right credit at the right moment and tell yourself you wanted it. Maybe you did want it. But want and desire are not the same thing. Want is appetite. Desire is something older and less negotiable. It has identified something in the work it needs to be in contact with and it will not be reasoned out of it. Walk into a room fuelled by strategy rather than genuine need and the work knows. The other actors know. Eventually you know. There is a particular exhaustion that comes from doing work you chose for the wrong reasons. It doesn't feel like tiredness. It feels like performing in an empty room — even when the room is full.
And then there is the third case, which is most of the work, most of the time. You take the job because you are an artist and artists need to work. The rent and the electricity bills are real. Advertisements. Extras work. Short form content. The jobs that don't appear in the biography but that keep the practice alive and the bills paid. That is not ambition in the damaging sense — it is professional life. What matters is what you do once you are in the room. The discipline of the working artist is to find something in the material, however small, that genuinely interests you — a relationship, a scene, a single line, the technical challenge of performing to a camera in a format you are still learning — and let that become your point of entry. Find something to love about the gig. You are not pretending to a desire you don't feel. You are creating the conditions for real engagement. That is craft. And it is completely different from the actor who took the job for the credit and is simply executing, waiting for it to be over.
Desire also drives the decisions that shape a career without ever looking like career decisions. By 1993, I knew I wanted to develop seriously as a director, but going back to university wasn't the right path. So I found the work that would teach me. I was fortunate to become associate artist at Melbourne Workers Theatre under Suzie Dee, and following that, associate artist at Deckchair Theatre under Angela Chapman. Neither position was strategic in the conventional sense. Both were chosen because they offered something I genuinely needed — proximity to directorial practice, the chance to work alongside people who were doing what I wanted to learn to do, and the freedom to develop without the pressure of being the finished article. They were also companies I had great admiration for. Both satisfied the desire. Both fuelled it further. It doesn't deplete. It compounds.
The actors I worked with playing Romeo and Juliet in my most recent production were a perfect example of what desire combined with discipline actually produces. They had done the homework. Thoroughly, seriously, without shortcuts. And because the preparation was complete, the work in the room was joyous. Almost effortless. Not because it was easy — Shakespeare is never easy — but because they had earned the freedom to play. That is what desire does when it is properly met with discipline. It doesn't produce competence. It produces joy.
I have certainly desired and wanted to do certain plays throughout my career — as an actor drawn to a particular role, as a director drawn to a particular text. Specific works. Stories that spoke to something in me that needed expressing or exploring. And generally, I have done them. Not to fulfil ambition. Not to add a credit or signal a status in the industry. To satisfy the artist.
"I act because I can't not act." — Judi Dench
There is a play I adore. Caroline Reid's Prayer to an Iron God. I have directed it in several states across Australia, staged a moved reading in the Northern Territory, and had the honour of co-writing the foreword with Aubrey Mellor in the published script. I would drop everything to do it again. This has nothing to do with ambition. It is pure desire — the desire to return to a play that has been compared to Sam Shepard, whose rehearsal room never loses its joy — even though the material is dark, whose text keeps revealing things no matter how many times I come back to it. None of the accolades were the reason I kept returning to it. The reason is simpler. The play demands everything you have. That is what desire feels like. That is what ambition never could.
If I had been relying on ambition to build my career, I do not think I would have come to India. There was no strategic logic to it. No obvious ladder to climb, no position in the Australian industry that required it, no calculated move toward a larger profile. What brought me here was something much simpler and much harder to argue with — a genuine desire to make work in this country, with Indian artists, in a theatre culture that has its own extraordinary rigour and its own way of understanding what performance is for. The training I offer here, the collaborations I have sought out, the relationships I have built — none of that was a plan. It was a following of curiosity, of real interest in what was happening here and whether I had something to contribute to it. I will always thank Kyla D'Souza from Peas and Carrots Theatre for being part of that journey. Ambition would never have sent me to Mumbai. Desire did.
Ambition is about where you want to be. Desire is about what you want to make. One keeps score. The other keeps creating.
A lack of ambition also kept me working when the industry wasn't inclined to keep me working.
If I didn't have a directing job, I created one. If I wasn't being cast, I found ways to gather collaborators and put myself in the room as both maker and performer. I moved into other parts of my art and started teaching. We opened the Blue Room Theatre — a venue in Perth that became one of the most important incubators for independent theatre in Western Australia, built by artists for artists because the industry wasn't providing the space we needed. We advocated for artists' rights and became deeply entrenched in the industry we were part of. That instinct — to generate rather than wait, to build the work rather than wait for the work to find you — is one of the most valuable things any artist can develop. The industry will not always come to you. Go to it. Or better still, build something alongside it.
I remember once when two colleagues and I found ourselves out of work at the same time. We were desperate to get on stage. Not for any strategic reason — there was no strategy. We simply needed to perform. Between the three of us we covered all the vocal ranges needed for a vocal group, so we decided to use that. We rehearsed five hours a day, five days a week, for a genuinely enjoyable month. We learned, played with, and eventually polished three full sets of sixties girl group songs. We called ourselves Don't Tell Aunty. The name alone told you everything about our ambitions.
We played fundraisers, backroom bars, cabaret rooms, and stages in Perth and Melbourne. Nobody commissioned us. Nobody told us to do it. We built it ourselves out of nothing more than a shared desire to be working and a willingness to put in the hours. All three of us came away from that period with more than we'd originally wanted, which was simply to perform. The daily rehearsal sharpened things. The variety of venues — from intimate backrooms to large pub and cabaret stages — taught us things about performance that more conventional work hadn't. The collaboration deepened in ways that only sustained shared work produces. We went in wanting to get on stage. We came out better artists.
Not all the work that builds a career looks like a career. That took me some time to understand, but once understood, easy to trust.
Some of my biggest professional opportunities as an actor came directly from some of the smallest plays I've ever appeared in. A tiny production. A modest venue. A run that most people in the industry would have considered beneath their attention. But someone was in the room. Someone saw something. And that small play opened a door that a more strategically chosen, more ambitious project never would have. I remember a beautiful little play called Scream Cora Scream, performed in an upstairs room of a pub. From that production I received auditions for other work — and the opportunities kept multiplying. The same has been true in my work as a director. Complete commitment regardless of scale has a way of being noticed. The room is never as empty as it looks.
For all my years of training at WAAPA, I worked as a barman in a theatre. Not because it was strategic. Because I needed the income and it kept me close to the world I was trying to enter. Night after night I stood behind that bar and served the audience I dreamt would one day be mine. That sounds romantic, and perhaps it was — but it was also instructive. I watched how they arrived. How they spoke to each other in the interval. What they carried out with them when the show was over and what they left behind. I was learning the audience from the inside of a glass, before I had ever stood on the other side of the professional footlights. And alongside them came the industry — actors, directors, designers, writers, every department in theatre eventually came through that bar. I was present. I was curious. I paid attention to what was being said around me, not to gather intelligence but because I was interested in the world these people were making. As I write this, I am remembering the pure joy of going up to the bio box and watching the lighting operator ride the show — early 1980s, pre-computers, when operating was still a genuinely creative act.
In the final months of my training, a director, John Saunders, came in. We spoke. He asked me when I was graduating. I told him a couple of months. He gave me his contact details, and told me to audition for his next production — Dorothy Hewitt's A Golden Valley. I have thought about that moment many times since. He did not offer me the audition because I had networked my way toward him or positioned myself strategically in his sightline. And he wasn't offering me the job. He offered me an audition because we had a real conversation. Because I was interested in what he was doing. Because, I suspect, I did not seem like someone who was using him.
That job behind the bar gave me my first professional engagement with the Playhouse Theatre Company — the flagship company of Perth, Western Australia at the time. The barman's job, the one that had nothing to do with performing, turned out to be one of the most important decisions I ever made. Ambition would never have sent me behind a bar. Ambition had a trajectory in mind and a bar job didn't fit it. But passion kept me near the work, near the people making it, and near the audience waiting to receive it. And the world noticed.
How you occupy your life between the acting jobs — the curiosity you bring to the people around you, the presence you maintain in the culture — that is not separate from your career. It is your career, accumulating quietly, in ways you won't recognise until much later.
That curiosity, that presence — it is also what people mistake for passivity. It isn't. We are in a business — let's not pretend otherwise — and that means staying awake to the world around us, to what's being made and by whom, to where opportunities are forming and whether we have something to offer them. That isn't ambition. That's professional consciousness. The distinction matters. Ambition is about destination. Awareness is about the present moment. One is self-referential. The other is genuinely looking outward.
It is worth being precise about this because awareness is easily confused with networking — and networking, in the way the word is commonly used, is ambition with a smile on its face. Networking is transactional. It asks: who in this room can be useful to me? Awareness asks something different — what is happening in this room that is worth paying attention to? The orientation is completely reversed. The networker is collecting. The aware artist is genuinely curious. They are interested in what other people are making, not because it might benefit them but because they are part of a culture and the culture is the thing they care about. Interested is interesting. That curiosity — real, unpretentious, directed outward — is what keeps an artist alive to their moment. It is also, not incidentally, what makes them good company. People want to work with artists who are interested in the work...and the world. They can feel the difference between someone who is present in a conversation and someone who is calculating their position in it.
Celebrity culture confuses ambition and awareness constantly — it dresses ambition up as awareness, makes the pursuit of visibility look like professional engagement. It isn't. Staying aware — of what the industry is making, of new collaborators, of work that's finding audiences, of conversations worth having — is part of the practice. It is how you remain a participant in the culture rather than a spectator of it. Awareness kept me in rooms. Ambition, had I leaned on it, would have had me measuring every room against the room I thought I deserved to be in instead.
An example of what awareness actually looks like is this: I remember one morning reading a newspaper and coming across an article reporting that the number of young girls being kidnapped in Australia was on the increase. At the time, I was thinking about new writer commissions for the company I was working with. I had no plan. No commission. No strategic reason to follow it. But something in that statistic pulled at me and I went down the rabbit hole — and by the time the journey ended many months later, playwright Finegan Kruckemeyer and I had created an extraordinary script called The Girl Who Was a Hundred Girls, inspired by the statistic and built around the figure of Elpis, the only god remaining in Pandora's box. The spirit of hope, left behind when everything else had escaped. That play did not begin with ambition. It did not begin with a career plan or a pitch or a gap in the season. It began with a newspaper and a morning coffee and a willingness to follow something that mattered. That is what awareness generates when you let it. Not visibility. Work. That is not a career strategy. That is a practice. And a practice, sustained over time, is a career.
A very dear friend of mine in Sydney recently appeared in an adaptation of The Seagull. He mostly took the gig because he admired the young writer and director and wanted the experience of working with them. The production rehearsed over a long period on weekends, which suited him, and it had a modest budget and a season in a small but up and coming venue. He was offered one of the smaller roles — and if you know your Chekhov, you'll know there are no small roles, only small actors. For my friend, a seasoned actor in his sixties wanting to stretch himself, this was a dream gig.
What resulted was a celebrated production and the nomination of my friend for Best Supporting Actor at the 2026 Sydney Theatre Awards.
This had nothing to do with ambition. It was a desire for an artistic experience — driven by respect for the work, interest in a new talented director, integrity about what he wanted from it, and genuine passion for the play. He chose what was worth doing over what was worth being seen doing.
That choice — made consistently, across a career, in room after room — is what a practice actually looks like.
The artists who sustain long careers are almost all practising something rather than chasing something. I have watched this from close range. I have also lived it — and I know the difference between the years when I was chasing and the years when I was practising. The practising years were better. The work was better. I was better.
Consider the audition. As a jobbing actor, your agent sends you out and you go. The ambition is to work. The desire is also to work. Those two things can look identical from the outside. When I was graduating, we were told that on average an actor would do a job that truly satisfied them every five years. I have found that to be largely true. Most of the work is the third case — you go, you find the thing that interests you, you do the job with everything you have. But the gigs that genuinely fed something in me as an artist were rare, and I knew them the moment I was in the room. As a director I have more agency over this. I can seek out the work that challenges me rather than wait to be sent to it. And yet I will admit honestly that roughly eighty percent of the directing jobs I pursued through formal application — the ones where I made the strategic case for myself, where I positioned and pitched — were among the least satisfying I have done. These were generally the jobs where casting was partially or entirely dictated to me for strategic reasons. There is usually a part of your heart that is missing. The professionalism is not to let that show in the work.
The jobs that came from desire, from genuine need to be in contact with a particular story or a particular group of artists, were the ones that gave something back. Every time. Without exception. None of it was the product of ambition. All of it was the product of practice — commitment to the work, to the industry, to the audience, to the people making things alongside me. A practice that didn't require the industry's approval to sustain itself. A practice that kept generating its own reasons to keep going.
So was it true? The self-deprecating joke I'd been telling for years — enormous passion, no ambition — was it actually true?
Yes. More than I knew when I first said it. The ambition I lacked turned out to be the thing I didn't need. The passion — the only thing that matters.
One more thing. Joy is not the reward at the end of a career built on passion. It is what was always there. The ambition was covering it. So was the resentment, the measurement. Remove those — not once, but daily — and what remains has always been there.
Ambition requires the industry's cooperation. Passion only requires yours. The career is what happens along the way.
A note from the author: the ideas, arguments, and experiences in this article are entirely my own — drawn from forty years of working in theatre, film, and actor training. I used AI tools during the writing process to assist with spelling, grammar, and the verification of facts. What it cannot do — and did not do — is think for me, feel for me, or replace the professional experience from which every observation in this article comes.
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