What my first acting showcase taught me about being a beginner again
After my first acting showcase with Manchester Actors Studio at The Kings Arms Theatre in Salford, I’ve been thinking about nerves, confidence, community and what it means to be a beginner again.
My first acting showcase with Manchester Actors Studio at The Kings Arms Theatre in Salford.
The thing I was most scared of was not forgetting my lines.
It was making my scene partner look bad.
That probably says something about me. I can worry about myself later, usually at 1am when it is least helpful, but in the lead-up to my first acting showcase with Manchester Actors Studio, the fear that kept appearing was much more specific: what if I mess this up for the person opposite me?
We were doing a scene from Clueless. I was playing Josh. Mia was playing Cher. Except instead of trying to pretend we had both wandered in from 1990s Beverly Hills, we had pulled it into a strange Australian-meets-Northern-English version that made more sense for us and for the room.
In our version, The Galleria became the Trafford Centre. Westwood became Fallowfield. School became uni. Mother and father became mum and dad. I got to say ‘I dunno’ in my actual Australian accent while Mia kept the whole thing grounded in her own UK accent. It was funny, slightly ridiculous, and exactly the sort of thing that would have made me want to disappear into the nearest wall a few years ago.
Performing a Manchester-tweaked Clueless scene as Josh, opposite Mia as Cher.
Starting again in a room above a pub
The showcase, on Wednesday 24 June, was at The Kings Arms Theatre in Salford, which is almost annoyingly close to where I live. Close enough that I could not dress it up as a dramatic cross-city mission. I just had to walk around the corner, climb the stairs, and do the thing.
It started at 7pm on the hottest day I have had in Manchester. I know I am Australian and therefore legally required to pretend I am fine in the heat, but Australia has air conditioning. Upstairs at The Kings Arms, in a room that felt like the air had simply clocked off, about 30 people had gathered to watch us perform.
Everyone was warm, slightly shiny, and trying very hard to act like performing in a boiling room above a pub was a completely normal thing to do on a Wednesday night.
I only started at Manchester Actors Studio on 30 April. My cousin Becky had told me about it a couple of weeks before, and I went along at first because I wanted somewhere to meet people in Manchester. That was the practical reason. The more honest reason is that I have always loved film and TV, always been interested in what makes people tick, and always wondered whether acting was something I could do.
At some point, wondering about something forever becomes its own quiet way of saying no.
The first class was nerve-wracking, but exciting. We were working on Northern accents from older British scenes, which is a fairly ambitious place to begin as an Australian who had been in Manchester less than a year. But I have family in Oldham, so the sounds were not completely alien. I did not have the accent perfected, but it felt familiar enough to chase.
Since then, I have done American accents, group scenes, one-on-one scenes, and work on camera. Every week I seem to walk away with the same strange adrenaline rush, buzzing as if I have just got away with something.
Most Thursday nights after class, I call my brother back home in Perth because I need to tell someone how much I am loving it.
That has surprised me.
Why acting felt different to music
I am used to performing. Sort of. Back home, I played weddings and events with GC Acoustics, which came with its own kind of nerves. But music nerves are different. With a guitar in front of you, there is something to hold onto. There is a song, a structure, a chord progression, a harmony, a job. If something goes slightly wrong, you can smile, keep playing, and hope the champagne has reached the right tables.
Acting feels more exposed.
There is no guitar. No microphone stand. No setlist. No safe little musical job to hide inside. There is just you, another person, a scene, and the terrifying requirement to actually listen.
That was the thing I kept thinking about before the showcase. I did not want to forget my lines. I did not want to rush. I did not want to go flat. I did not want to let Mia down. I wanted to be supportive, committed and present. I wanted to show that I was taking it seriously, even if I was still new and still unsure where to put all the nerves.
After the showcase, over a beer, Mia joked that she had seen me getting fidgety in my seat before we went up. I would love to say that was a considered acting warm-up, but it was probably equal parts nerves, heat, and being trapped in a chair that had started to feel personal.
She was right too. I had been fidgety. In the moment, I was trying to sit still and act normal, but I think my body had other plans. Hearing her joke about it afterwards made the whole thing feel less dramatic. It reminded me that we had both been in it together, both trying to land the scene, and both allowed to be nervous without letting the nerves run the whole thing.
That is probably why doing it with someone else helped. You have to get out of your own head a bit, because the scene is not only about you. You are responsible for giving the other person something to work with.
Once the showcase started, there was no room to overthink it.
One by one, people from class got up and became these fully formed little worlds in front of us. Characters appeared. Accents shifted. Scenes changed shape. People I had been chatting to casually in class suddenly had a completely different energy when they stepped into the work.
Two classmates performed the fight scene from Marriage Story, the one with Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson, and it properly pulled the room in. I love scenes like that. The intense ones. The ones where the pauses matter as much as the dialogue. Sometimes a silence can do more than a line if the people in it trust the moment enough to let it sit.
That was the kind of thing I found myself watching and thinking: I want to be able to do that.
The thing that surprised me about Manchester
What I liked most about the night was that it did not feel like everyone was trying to beat each other. It felt like everyone wanted each other to land.
There was a real sense of community in the room. People laughed when things were funny. They listened when scenes needed quiet. They clapped properly. They gave each performance the respect of paying attention. And afterwards, everyone stayed for a few pints, which might have been the most Manchester ending possible. The night opened up then. You got to talk to people properly, learn what they do, what they care about, what brought them there, what makes them tick.
I love that stuff. I think I always have.
It is probably the same reason I like writing. And communications. And music. And good films. And long conversations in pubs where someone casually reveals a tiny detail about themselves that explains almost everything. I like trying to understand people. I like stories. I like the gap between what someone says and what they mean. Acting feels like another way into that.
One of the things that has surprised me since moving to Manchester is how seriously people take the arts.
I do not mean seriously in a pretentious way. I mean seriously in the sense that it is allowed to matter. Dan, who teaches the class, treats the work like it matters. The class treats it like it matters. People are not embarrassed to care. There were industry people in the room, and there was a feeling that this was not just a drama-class hobby happening above a pub. It was a group of people trying to get better at something that could, potentially, lead somewhere.
That has taken me a bit of time to get my head around.
In Perth, tall poppy syndrome is real. Not always, and not from everyone, but enough that you learn to soften the edges of wanting something. You learn to say things casually. You make everything sound smaller than it is. You say you are ‘just doing a bit of music’ or ‘just writing a thing’ or ‘just trying something out’, because saying you care too much can feel embarrassing.
I remember commenting on a TikTok clip of Ruel talking about tall poppy syndrome, and the response made me realise how many Australians seem to recognise that feeling immediately. It is not that nobody supports creative ambition back home. People do. But there is a particular embarrassment around wanting something too openly.
Here, I keep finding rooms where people care openly.
That is new for me.
It is also confronting, because if everyone else is taking it seriously, you eventually have to ask whether you are willing to take yourself seriously too.
What the showcase taught me
The biggest thing I learned from the showcase was not that I am suddenly an actor. Not that I nailed everything. Not that I am ready to quit my job and demand a trailer with my name on it. Calm down, Gregory.
But I did learn that I might be better at this than the nervous part of my brain wants me to believe.
I learned that I enjoy being in rooms full of creative people. I learned that I come alive around artsy, curious, slightly intense people who want to make things and talk about why they work. I learned that embarrassment is not actually fatal, despite what my nervous system occasionally suggests. I learned that if you wait until you are completely confident before trying something, you will probably never try it.
And I learned that not having a go is also a choice.
That one is annoying, because it means I cannot pretend neutrality is the same as safety. If I keep standing at the edge of things I want to do, waiting to become the kind of person who is brave enough to do them, I am still making a decision. I am just making the quieter one.
I did not know where to begin when it came to picking a scene. Mia suggested Clueless, and honestly, that was probably exactly what I needed. There is a part of me that would have loved to do something impressive and intense straight away, something with heavy pauses and serious actor face and a big emotional finish. But I am new to this. At this stage, I would rather try things, learn what I enjoy, work out what kind of scenes I gravitate towards, and build the confidence to stay present on stage.
That feels like the point of being a beginner. You do not need to know your lane yet. You need to be willing to get in the room.
The showcase made me think a lot about confidence. Not in the loud, fearless, look-at-me sense. More in the quieter sense of trusting yourself enough to stay in the moment when you are in a new room, and you are not completely sure where you fit yet.
I have not always cared what people think. There are parts of my life where I have been brave, stubborn, ridiculous and completely sure of myself. But in a new creative environment, with people I respect, I can become very aware of being watched. Acting leaves you with nowhere to put that. You cannot fully do the scene and monitor everyone’s opinion of you at the same time. You have to pick.
For a few minutes, upstairs in that boiling room in Salford, I had to pick the scene.
And it felt good.
Not perfect. Not easy. But good.
That is why this matters to me. It is not just that I did a showcase. It is that I did something I had been thinking about doing for years. I put myself in a new room, in a new city, with people I did not know, and tried to be present enough to make something work. I got nervous. I did it anyway. Then I walked out buzzing.
There is a version of me that never would have gone to that first class on 30 April. There is a version of me that would have seen Becky’s message, thought ‘that looks cool’, and done nothing. There is a version of me that would have decided it was too late, too cringe, too exposing, too much.
I am glad that was not the version that showed up.
When I call my brother after class, part of it is just excitement. Part of it is probably me wanting a witness back home. Proof that I am not just sitting around in Manchester waiting for something to happen. Proof that I am building a life here, meeting people, trying things, and making the most of the ridiculous decision to move across the world and start again.
Maybe there is an element of wanting to prove myself in that. I can live with that. There are worse engines than wanting the people you love to know you are trying.
I do not know where acting goes from here. Maybe it becomes a serious thing. Maybe it makes me better at writing. Maybe it makes me more confident in rooms. Maybe it gives me a new group of people in Manchester. Maybe it simply keeps giving me that Thursday-night feeling where I leave class buzzing and need to tell someone before the adrenaline wears off.
For now, that is enough.
I am learning that you do not always need to know where something is going before you let it matter.
Sometimes you just have to walk around the corner, climb the stairs, sweat through a Manchester-tweaked Clueless scene above a pub, and find out what happens when you stop watching from the side and actually have a go.
Read more from Greg
I write about music, culture, travel and creative life from Manchester and beyond.
