Confessions of a utility actor

The first thing I do when I get to work is make friends with the director of photography. He's the one responsible for the way every shot is framed and lit. At my most well rested I have dark circles under my eyes, and the D.P. is the one who decides whether I get to look like a really tired Jerry Seinfeld or a dead Steve Buscemi. This is the kind of thing I never cared about in New York, but need to care about now.

I finally became a series regular on a very bad Ted Danson sitcom called "Becker," playing his only mildly schmucky cousin/accountant. Now, I'd be lying if I said my first thought wasn't "I'm gonna get to take my new girlfriend to Ted Danson's house for lunch, and she's gonna think I'm the shit." But my second thought was about getting back to New York, and what a two-bedroom apartment might be going for in, oh, about five years. I got tons of laughs during rehearsals for the pilot; Ted Danson even told me I was "great" (uh oh), and the night we shot the pilot, his wife, Mary Steenburgen, grabbed me by the arm and said "I love your character most of all." Just before the show, I took a walk around the place to soak in the feeling of my new home, and for the first time since I'd worked on Broadway, I let myself imagine a life that included enough health insurance to have children. But I was fully fluent in Hollywood-speak by then, so I knew that when, at the party on the set afterward, the president of Paramount Television gave me a big hug and said, "You are going to be at Paramount for a very long time," it meant I was going to be at Paramount for about 11 more minutes. My character was cut from the show a month later.

The executive producer called me to deliver the news and said he had just gotten off the phone with Les Moonves, the president of CBS, and that Les had said, among other things, "I'm a big Peter Birkenhead fan." As my grandfather might have said, "With fans like that, who needs hot air?"

I thought I would be devastated -- I wanted to be devastated. But the truth is, when I saw an episode of "Becker" a few months later, I could hear the distinct and comforting sound of a bullet whizzing by my head. And you know what was most comforting of all? That it happened again, right away. The first job I got after "Becker" was on "Frasier," and that character was cut, too. I realized that losing jobs was just part of the job. My metamorphosis into an L.A. actor was complete.

I've worked a lot since then, on shows like "Ally McBeal," "The West Wing," "Six Feet Under" and "Grey's Anatomy" -- mostly in parts that were interesting enough to keep me chasing the next job and well paying enough to cover the rent. None of that would have happened if I hadn't gotten hugged at Paramount, so I'm grateful things went the way they did. And now they're going a new way.

The guiding principle in television is "get the shot," which means keep shooting, and talking, no matter what happens, because it might be good enough to move on and finish the episode on time and keep your job. So actors keep plugging away, trying to get the shot -- get their shot at making it -- even when the odds are staggeringly against them. But the definition of "making it" keeps changing as you hit your 40s and people like Donald Trump become stars.

Don't get me wrong, I'm still an actor -- I'm still available for the calls when they come -- but mostly I'm busy with other things. I've written the word "actor" in the "occupation" space on my tax return for 20 years, but this year I'll probably put "writer."

My old dogmas about doing only the noble work of theater became obsolete as soon as I discovered the nobility to be had in punching a studio clock and getting paid for an honest day's work. But I'm not sure how much longer I'll be doing that. Being an actor requires a belief in limitless possibilities, and these days I actually prefer limits. When you suspect a star-making, life-changing gig is around every corner it becomes difficult to believe in anything else. But I still watch television, and I love seeing my friends when they're in something. It's always like watching a small triumph: Someone's working again after a dry spell, or got their dental insurance back.

A little happy ending, at least for now.

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