Author: Jen Levin

As you have probably read by now, Ms. In The Biz will be discontinuing the blogging section of the site soon. While all the archives will still be up (and I highly recommend checking to see what posts you may have missed), this is going to be my last article for the site. And as someone who was brought on board before Ms. In The Biz was even live, I’ve written about a lot of things! Some of my favorite posts, have been the various top 10 lists I did. It was so much fun to write these posts because…

I’ve recently had some experience producing my own work. One was a project that a friend wrote after I bugged him about how he never wrote anything for the two of us. Another was a project that I was randomly inspired to do. One was a really successful project and one fell apart before I had a chance. The successful one was the one that my friend wrote. I passed the script to a director friend of mine and he loved it. He started working with us right away and put together an amazing team to help us out. He…

I’ve written about having a balanced life on here before, but I’ve had to remind myself of that a lot lately. I’ve been busy between producing a short film I starred in, working on starting up another short film I’ll be producing, my day jobs, and working on my acting career. Some days it feels like everything I’m doing is working toward the goal of making my living as an actor. That’s not a bad thing occasionally, but I also don’t want to get overwhelmed and forget to take care of myself as well. I have done some travel lately…

This month, I turned 33. I have no fear of revealing my age (it’s on my IMDb page and all over my personal blog) so I’m excited to be 33! I think it’s going to be a great year for me and I’m excited what posts I may be able to write on here in the coming year. But I know that not all actors and actresses feel the same way about being open about their real age. Maybe it’s because I don’t look 33 (I almost look younger now than I did in college), but even though I understand…

“You are just too fat for this part.” This is something I actually was told at an audition earlier this year. It’s the not the first time I’ve heard it and I’m sure it won’t be the last. I don’t think the person who said it to me meant it as anything to hurt me, but it still wasn’t easy to hear. But it wasn’t easy to hear for the reasons you may think. More often than not, as an actor you aren’t going to book the job. You may be a bad actor, but I’m going to assume you…

I’ve been pursuing being an actor for a long time. I moved to LA in 2001 to attend college, but I was also auditioning for commercials and tv and taking acting classes outside of school. After being in the creative life for almost 15 years, I’ve seen a lot of friends “make it” and have incredible success. It’s awesome seeing someone’s dream come true and knowing how much hard work they put into it. But I’ve also seen dozens of friend quit the industry for various reasons. Some of the people who have quit have done so because they got…

As actors, I think it’s a universal thing that we are nervous going into any audition. Auditions mean that you might have the chance to live your dream. You might be able to book more parts because of a part you get. And if you are lucky an audition can mean that you can quit your thrival jobs and finally be living as an actor. That pressure can make anyone nervous whether it is a 1 line part or a series regular. We all have tricks that we use to make the nerves go away as much as possible, but…

I’m at the age where it seems like everyone else is getting married. I was actually just at a close friend’s wedding earlier this month. It was a wonderful wedding and I had the greatest time there. But while I was attending various wedding related events like the engagement party, bridal shower, and bachelorette party; one topic kept coming up. Whether or not my friend is going to keep her name or take her husband’s name. In the group of women at these events, it was a pretty even mix of industry and non-industry people. And it almost seemed to…

I want to focus a bit on personal lives instead of business lives. I know I’ve written a post before about mixing business and personal, but I realized after completing that post that I still wanted to say more. As actors, we tend to focus a lot on our outsides. We want to stay in shape to get the roles we want or for a specific role because we may need to wear a skimpy costume (or nothing at all). We color our hair so our roots (or grays) don’t show. We wear makeup whenever we are out and about…

Over the past few weeks, I’ve had a couple of actor friends reach out to me wanting to ask me questions. A lot of the time, people want to know about my agents because I’m happy with them and always talk positively about them (I guess that’s rare, but most of my friends seem to be happy with their representation). But lately, people have wanted to know about how to keep going with this career choice. With it being pilot season, a lot of actors are having doubts. They see how many pilot auditions their friends or competition are getting…

I know a lot of actors who like to keep their real life and their actor life as separate as they can. They don’t want people to know they are married or have kids because they don’t want to be seen as someone who can’t play a crazy single character. Or they hide financial troubles from other people because they want to be seen as successful no matter what. And of course there are plenty of celebrities who keep their personal lives as private as possible and out of tabloids. I used to be someone who had an actor persona…

While I think that every year is a successful year for me, I think that 2015 was a particularly good year for me. I’ve been able to accomplish things I’ve wanted to do for years and took steps in my career that I felt were so out of my reach. Some of the highlights of 2015 for me included getting back into an improv class. That was something that I said I would do every year for several years. I hated that I was breaking a promise to myself each year. But last year, I did it. I had my…

I’ve talked about getting headshots done on here before. I personally find having headshots done fun and I don’t stress out about them too much. I’ve had some really bad photo shoots (and sometimes really horrible reshoots after those bad shoots), so I don’t have a fear of bad photos. If I don’t get a photo out of a shoot that I want, I can always ask for a reshoot or just not use the new photos. I don’t want to waste money on photos so I’m choosey on who my photographers are, but I also know that it isn’t…

For the past 5 years, I’ve been resisting taking an improv based acting class. I haven’t been class-free for those years (I’ve taking auditioning and commercial classes), but improv was out of my life. And just this week, I was finally able to add improv back in. And it’s something that I’ve needed to do for a long time and have been resisting it for far too long. The reason improv was out of my life was that I’ve been dealing with the death of my beloved acting coach, Kip King. I studied with Kip from the time I was…