December 2021. I was twenty-four, the world was still half-shut, and I drove to a shoot genuinely unsure whether I'd go through with it. I did. That scene became the first thing anyone ever knew about me.
Five years is long enough to stop performing certainty about it. So here's the honest version — the things I wish someone had said to me before that first day, laid out plainly, without the swagger and without the pity.
Nobody warns you that the hard part is the waiting
You imagine the job is the sex. The job is mostly not the sex. The job is arriving early, sitting in a room you don't know, making small talk with people you just met, and waiting. Waiting for lighting. Waiting for a reset. Waiting while someone fixes a cable. You are, for most of the day, a person in a bathrobe on a folding chair looking at their phone.
The actual performing is a fraction of it, and it arrives in short bursts, on cue, whether or not your body agrees. That is the skill. Not appetite — availability. Being able to produce something real on someone else's schedule, take after take, while a camera operator says "one more, from the other side."
The first thing this job takes from you isn't your dignity. It's your assumption that desire is something that just shows up.
The pressure lands differently on men, and nobody wants to talk about it
I've said this in interviews and I'll say it here. A male performer has exactly one failure mode and it is visible to everyone in the room. There's no acting around it. When it goes wrong — and it goes wrong for everyone eventually — it goes wrong in front of eight people who are waiting on you, on a clock that costs money.
What that does to your head is hard to describe to people outside it. You start monitoring yourself, and monitoring yourself is precisely the thing that makes it worse. I spent most of my first year quietly convinced I was one bad day away from being finished. I've written more about the pressure of being a male performer, because it deserves its own conversation.
What fixed it wasn't confidence. It was routine, sleep, and being honest with directors when I wasn't in a state to deliver. The performers who last are the ones who learned to say "give me ten minutes" instead of white-knuckling it.
Your first scene follows you forever, so choose it like it will
Mine did. It still does. That first scene is, for a lot of people, the entire thing they know about me — and it is genuinely strange to have a permanent public record of a decision you made at twenty-four in a pandemic.
I don't regret it. But I'd tell anyone starting: the internet has no mechanism for forgetting, and your future self is a real person who has to live with what you post today. Shoot it because you want to, not because you're broke and it's Tuesday. The financial pressure is real — I got into this because the pandemic took every other option away, and I won't pretend otherwise. Just go in with your eyes open.
The industry is smaller and kinder than you think, and colder than you hope
Sets are professional. Overwhelmingly. There's testing, there's paperwork, there's a coordinator, and people check in with you more than civilians would ever believe — I've written out how a professional set actually works for anyone who's curious. The horror stories exist, but they are the exception, and the exception gets all the airtime.
What's cold is the business. Nobody is managing your career. There is no HR, no pension, no sick pay, nobody who calls to see if you're okay when the bookings stop. You are a very small company of one, and if you don't act like it the money evaporates and you don't notice until it's gone.
You lose things that have nothing to do with the work
My Instagram — nearly everything I'd built there — is gone. Removed. Not for anything I posted on it, but for what I do off it. That account was years of work and it vanished with no appeal that went anywhere. I've written about what deplatforming actually costs, and the short version is that it costs a great deal more than the followers.
You also lose a certain kind of casual anonymity. You can't un-ring it. People recognise you in ordinary places and they are, mostly, lovely about it. But it is never quite nothing.
What I'd tell 2021 me
That moving into mainstream studio sets was one of the best decisions I made, and one of the scariest. That the money is real but lumpy, and the people who survive treat it like a business. That being decent on set gets you re-booked more reliably than anything you can do with your body.
And that in five years, people will be writing about you online who have never met you, never spoken to you, and in some cases aren't even people — and the only real defence is to say the true version yourself, in your own words, somewhere you own.
Which is what this is.