Acting brought me to Portsmouth, for a short film about death, memory, and the future of exploitation.

I shan’t say too much about it, as despite being an extremely niche blog there’s still the possibility that the people involved will find this, and I’ll have broken some crucial aspect of my contract.

I played a receptionist, working for some shiny company that puts customers in touch with the memories of their dead relations.

The script is vague enough that the situation is open to interpretation. I couldn’t figure out if this company had figured out how to upload the souls of the dead to the internet, like a Russel T Davies Doctor Who episode from 2007, or whether they’d simply defeated death, like a Russell T Davies Torchwood episode from 2011.

Either way, I assumed my role involved being corporate but also reassuring, like the public face of a cyber-Dignitas, so I dressed accordingly. I wore a cardigan.

I was met downstairs by a lovely, deadpan runner, and was brought up to the third floor of a University of Portsmouth building within the architectural department. Fittingly, we were filming within the virtual reality room, near a small guide to the history of VR (omg I wore that headset in Nottingham next door to laser quest in 1992 etc) and a fundamentally impressive rig. Maybe Mark Zuckerberg’s dream of a legless metaverse is still a possibility after all?

I was slightly early for my call time of 12:30, and was offered lunch. “Actually, just a drink would be nice”.

“Oh no, we don’t have any drinks.”

One quick dash downstairs to get a cuppa later, I was ready for some hot acting action.

As you probably know, acting involves a lot of hanging around. I went through my four lines of dialogue, and was surprised to find I knew them. I then played chess against myself on a nearby board, and wrote a postcard to Ash pontificating mock-pompously about the meek nature of today’s twentysomethings.

While being mic-ed up, I complimented the sound guy on their excellent socks and T-shirt highlighting a meme I didn’t understand.

I also met the actor playing the protagonist, an Italian woman who seemed at least twenty years younger than me but had so much acting experience she couldn’t possibly have been.

I wasn’t given much direction, beyond my shirt, and had decided to play my character as competent, reassuring, but with a hint of empathy. Fortunately, this is what they were going for.

“The cardigan is to give my receptionist a smarmy but mildly malevolent edge”, I explained, without success.

The protagonist explained that the film was set not necessarily in the future, but in a parallel universe to our own, in which certain dystopian technologies had already been invented, which was reassuring to me, as my clothes and hairline were definitely from 2025.

To add the sense of general unreality, we were to perform in whatever the present version of a green screen is, our physical bodies manifested into a computer generated set, with only a hearty office plant supplementing the real.

This meant that hitting our marks was even more important than usual, and a lot of the set-up involved ensuring that I didn’t involuntarily hand an iPad directly through a virtual desk, or shuffling about so that the unreal perspective didn’t make me resemble Gandalf to my pretagonist’s Bilbo.

For a while it was like I’d achieved my lifelong dream of appearing on Knightmare. “Can you move two steps to the left,” demanded the cameraman. “Forward half a pace,” suggested the director. “Caution team,” said Treguard, in my head.

I did *not* say any of this out loud, as everyone was either Italian, born after the year 2000, or both.

There followed something all jobbing actors will be familiar with: a lot of standing about. Adding to the weirdness was the panopticon of the digital backdrop – we could see our heads from various angles, and we had to try to stay in position while the background boffins made it so that my belly wasn’t exploding through the reception desk like an Alien through a Bishop, or that my smile wasn’t weirdly exploding through the imaginary desktop computer.

As I said: this kind of preparation is extremely tedious, especially if you’re already in a scene that is already questioning the very nature of existence.

Amid the faff, I made polite medium-talk with the star. Rising fascism in Italy. Dodgy landlords in south London. Why Kilburn High Road isn’t a very pleasant place to go for a drink these days.

Finally, we were ready for action. I remembered all my lines, but I forgot to wait until the director to say “action” before I started talking.

We then did it again, from a slightly different angle.

And again, this time from the back of my head.

And then again, from my left shoulder.

As someone who’s used to live shows, and also who has spent a lot of the past decade explicitly *not* pivoting to video, seeing my face and body over-lit from various angles while standing in exactly the same position without recompense to a smartphone distraction device was mildly discombobulating.

In fact I used the word “discombobulating” a few times, to generalised confusion.

But actually, I didn’t mind too much.

Like a lot of us, I’m used to seeing my face in fairly flattering ways, either photos that I choose to put out into the world, or in mirrors lit reasonably flatteringly.

Seeing my enormous head looming over the fake afterlife reception was, in a weird way, strangely reassuring.

This is how I look, from some angles, in certain light, and wearing certain cardigans. And that’s fine.

Finally, the director said “that’s a wrap”, and I was able to head off into the wilds of Portsmouth. Hopefully they’ll share the film with me when it’s done and you can get an idea of what on earth I’ve been wanging on about.