The Body That Fits The Bill: Physical Capital and ‘Crises’ of the Body in Actor Training

Drawing on case study research in Britain’s commercial performance industry and five UK drama schools, this article discusses the actor’s experience of their body as capital. It examines actors’ narratives of these experiences, and the links that they establish between the perception of the body as an object to be invested in, the employment process of typecasting, and the ongoing contemporary dominance of what Rancière calls the ‘representative regime of the arts’. By purposefully confining itself to a capitalist language of supply, demand and value, this discussion of the actor’s body emphasizes the reductive nature of such language, and finally proposes possibilities for a re-imagined employment approach that might be drawn from the craft of acting itself.