I'm posting this now in honor of Shang- Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings that opens in theatres today:
Jul. 15, 2017 "Accountant changes careers for a different role- as an actor": Today I found this article by Guy Dixon in the Globe and Mail. He profiled Simu Liu. I saw the first 2 episodes of Kim's Convenience when it came out:
This story is the 13th in a series that features students and graduates who are using their business degrees in nontraditional fields.
Actor Simu Liu is the shining example of using a business degree toward a creative and very unexpected end, not toward a career in accounting.
The rising Canadian actor, most recognizable for his role as the son, Jung, in the CBC-TV sitcom Kim’s Convenience, fell into acting after jettisoning accounting and a corporate path which he had been following without much gumption.
After relocating to Canada from China and growing up in Mississauga, his parents would have liked him to become a doctor, engineer or lawyer, basically anything professionally minded. Accounting fit the bill.
Yet, “I was very unfocused when I was little,” he says.
Mr. Liu attended the University of Toronto Schools, a private secondary school affiliated with the university, and then received an honours business administration (HBA) degree from the University of Western Ontario’s Ivey Business School. The degree allows undergrads to enter the business stream midway through their undergraduate studies.
But then he found himself on a path that wasn’t for him. Not graduating near the top of the class, he felt that the higher rungs of Bay Street weren’t attainable. His marks were “middle/middle-bottom, so my option was basically accounting,” he says. This led to a job working for accounting giant Deloitte in downtown Toronto, but Mr. Liu didn’t feel he was a good fit.
“Evidently they didn’t think I was either. Eight months in, they laid me off. The first round of cuts, and I was right out,” he says. There is no hint of sour grapes in the retelling.
“Something was telling me I should probably take some time and pursue something that I hadn’t before, maybe just to try it. I had been so miserable as an accountant, at least take a few months and do something cool with your life,” he says. “That was the original plan.”
Then, as he remembers it, a new calling arose, wrapped up in a deep interest in film and television. “I was raised as an only child. My parents worked a lot. I was basically raised on TV and movies. They would drop me off at a movie theatre on a Saturday morning and say, ‘Here’s $20, knock yourself out,’” he says. “And so I would often times watch four or five movies every weekend. I had always been curious and enamoured with that whole industry.”
Then came the pivotal point.
On Craigslist, he answered an online call for extras on the set of the big-budget, effects-laden, Earth-in-peril, giant-robots-versus-giant-alien-monsters action epic Pacific Rim, being shot in Toronto and directed by Guillermo del Toro. It was a little different than Bay Street life.
“It was the first time I had ever set foot on a set,” he says. “I’d show up at 4 in the morning, getting paid $11 an hour, significantly less than I was as an accountant.
“But I fell in love with the whole thing. The set was so big and intricate. I was surrounded by not just working actors, but also everybody from the grips to the gaffers to the ADs [assistant directors]. It felt to me like everybody was so passionate about what they were doing, so focused. It was a totally different world.”
He adds: “Guillermo del Toro notoriously pays attention to detail that he puts into a world visually. So, of course, stepping in, I was, oh my god, this is so cool?”
This led to more shoots, a music video here or there, sometimes working for $50 or $100 a day, sometimes free. “The goal was getting that experience, finding my footing in the industry,” Mr. Liu says.
“And then I started to realize, as an Asian performer, I was getting a lot of opportunities ahead of my pay grade, ahead of my experience, because the talent pool is not big enough.
“So, I was, like, oh that’s interesting. There’s an opportunity here. It’s not just something I can do because I’m passionate about it.”
Bigger roles came, and more of them, “and all that was missing now was for me to up my skill level. That meant taking acting night classes and building experience that way.”
In retrospect, it wasn’t entirely a new discovery, but a rediscovery of an interest he had blocked himself from pursuing.
He hadn’t participated in theatre at school. “I never really gave myself the permission. I couldn’t say I wasn’t interested, but I didn’t know what it would be like broaching the subject with my parents, who were very, ‘Get a technical degree, get a stable job.’ Acting seemed to fly in the face of all of that.”
He hadn’t participated in theatre at school. “I never really gave myself the permission. I couldn’t say I wasn’t interested, but I didn’t know what it would be like broaching the subject with my parents, who were very, ‘Get a technical degree, get a stable job.’ Acting seemed to fly in the face of all of that.”
It only really came to him after he “lost kind of everything,” after leaving an accounting career. Yet the business education helped, Mr. Liu says, with personal skills, networking, all of the soft skills that business people and actors share, plus a later appreciation of how the film industry works business-wise.
Just don’t equate the happiness that Mr. Liu’s character shows on Kim’s Convenience for office work with Mr. Liu’s own career experience.
The chance of returning to accounting is “infinitesimally small. I’m such a different person now. My mind has been opened in so many ways, it would be impossible to pigeonhole me back into that.”
2 comments:
FakePM
16 days ago
Very few people are born accountants. Most fall down the rabbit hole and never climb out for the secure job aspect. Many do find their way out of the Matrix. Nice to see when it happens. I hope a lot of accountants are out there reading this.
Andrew from Toronto
18 days ago
“And then I started to realize, as an Asian performer, I was getting a lot of opportunities ahead of my pay grade, ahead of my experience, because the talent pool is not big enough.”
This is interesting. Conventional wisdom is that non-white actors have more trouble getting roles, since there are fewer roles written for non-whites. Still, there were roles out there, including the play Banana Boys (2015) and the TV series Blood and Water (season 1). From the point of view of someone with a business degree, both roles had some form of businessman in them.
My opinion: Yeah, I was thinking the same thing too as Andrew said.
However, times are changing and I am seeing more ethnic diversity on TV.
This is a flashback of 2007 and I was watching The Young and the Restless during the summer time when I had more free time. I went on twop.com to make my comment:
"Did you notice the ethnic diversity on this show? There are African- Americans playing the doctors and Asian women playing Bardwell's physical therapist and the woman who worked at the morgue."
Then someone on twop.com said: "I didn't notice that until you pointed it out."
Sept. 7, 2018 "How movies translate to the workplace": Today I found this article by Harvey Schachter in the Globe and Mail:
A lot of the fiction I have encountered about business and the workplace has a negative cast. Novelists are outsiders, jaundiced critics, and their work tends to reflect that perspective. So it was a surprise to find a recent extensive look at business narratives in novels, biographies, memoirs, films and TV found that a dominant category is positive, to the point of effusive.
This is important not just because it proves me wrong – that happens all the time – but because the narratives we carry in our head can influence us.
We can emulate the heroes (or villains) of books. We can also choose our careers based on these stories.
“The narratives we read and watch about business affect how we perceive, understand or respond to business,” says Sandford Borins, a professor of strategic management at the University of Toronto.
Along with his wife Beth Herst, who has a background in literature and playwriting, they found 63 texts from the past 35 years to study, focusing on three industries – IT, auto manufacturing and financial trading – since that might reveal whether the dominant narratives vary by sector, which in fact they do.
Over all, two types of narratives are the biggies, and they are opposites:
- Corporate Nirvana, in which the protagonists, along with their shareholders and other backers, benefit financially, and societal benefits accrue to employees and customers with that spreading through a multiplier effect more broadly. Books and films on Apple’s Steve Jobs and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg are prime examples.
- Corporate Nightmare, in which senior executives’ malfeasance bankrupts the company, destroys their careers and reputations, and sends shockwaves through the broader community, with significant collateral damage. The financial implosion a decade ago added to this genre.
Between those two black-and-white narratives are two others in which someone fights the corporate entity on behalf of the larger social good. In the Defeated Critic category, the whistleblower or external critic fails, and society continues to suffer while the company continues to profit.
Michael Moore’s Roger and Me was very popular, boosting the filmmaker’s career, but it didn’t change General Motors so it falls into this category, along with the documentary Who Killed the Electric Car?
In the Triumphant Critic category, the individual uses insider knowledge or external expertise to bring a socially irresponsible corporation to heel, as depicted in the docudramas Erin Brockovich and The Insider.
Those four scenarios probably resonate with you because they capture important themes and you have encountered them in narratives.
The four other categories also may seem familiar:
Sacrificial/Thrown Out, in which a founder is pushed out or someone’s intellectual property is exploited by others;
Retributive fables, in which social institutions such as the media, courts or citizen activists obtain retribution for corporate wrongdoing;
Corporate Rip-Off, in which the protagonist and corporation benefit at high social cost; and, finally,
Inside Job, in which corporate insiders through perverse incentives benefit themselves through actions detrimental to their firm’s long-term success.
The insanely great fable dominates the literature and films we see about IT.
Corporate Nirvana is also dominant in auto manufacturing, but with a cult of personality flavour over the years, be it My Life and Work by Henry Ford in 1922, the 1980s best seller Iacocca or, more recently, Ashlee Vance’s book, Elon Musk.
Financial trading is dominated by Corporate Nightmares, be it the chronicles of Enron or movies such as Wall Street or Wolf of Wall Street.
“The biggest decisions that millennials are making in their lives is who to work for – which industries. These stories influence those choices. So lots of millennials who identify with the heroes in the corporate start-up fable want to be that person,” Mr. Borins says.
They are fooling themselves. Whereas 90 per cent of IT stories are of the corporate nirvana variety and the remaining 10 per cent describing failures, he guesses in the real world the numbers are exactly the opposite.
Many of his students have entered the financial world after watching the movies Wall Street and Wolf of Wall Street, dreaming of enormous wealth and missing the fact that those are meant to be cautionary tales. “They figure they will be like Gordon Gekko, only smarter and not be caught,” he says.
So next time you read a book or watch a film on business, consider how it may be playing with your mind. And it’s more than choosing a career.
We want to be the leaders we see in movies, steadfast and dominant, but real life can require a quite different flavour.
Cannonballs
Here are Sandford Borins’ top-10 business movies (chronologically):
- The Big Short (2015): Adam McKay’s depiction of the financial crisis for fun and profit, with a reminder of the human cost.
- Margin Call (2011): J.C. Chandor’s directorial debut imagining the financial crisis as a disaster thriller.
- Revenge of the Electric Car (2011): Chris Paine’s in-the-moment documentary about the commercialization of the electric car.
- The Social Network (2010): Aaron Sorkin’s screenplay about the creation of Facebook from the dueling perspectives of Mark Zuckerberg and the partners who were thrown under the bus.
- Inside Job (2010): Charles Ferguson’s Academy Award-winning documentary about the causes and culprits of the financial crisis.
- Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005): Alex Gibney’s documentary about how the energy trading firm Enron went big and then went bust.
- Startup.com (2000): Jehane Noujaim’s fly-on-the-wall documentary about a startup that crashed on the launch-pad.
- Pirates of Silicon Valley (1999): Martyn Burke’s docudrama about Steve Jobs/Apple and Bill Gates/Microsoft as necessary frenemies.
- Roger & Me (1989): Michael Moore’s career-launching documentary about a beleaguered GM’s impact on its community ecosystem.
- Wall Street (1987): Michael Douglas’s Academy Award-winning performance as a corporate raider/inside trader that inspired thousands of wannabes.
No comments:
Post a Comment