Ethan Lawrence, a British actor best known for his roles in After Life and Bad Education, has revealed that he is considering quitting acting after a period of little work.
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The 31-year-old shared a video on TikTok where he explained how “2024 has been a really bad year” and he is the “closest he has ever been” to giving up acting.
He also explained how he is dealing with personal problems, as well as ones regarding his living situation, saying that his landlord has “sold my house out from underneath me”.
“With that,” he explained, “comes a lot of expenditure. And this also comes off the back of nearly a year and a half with no acting work.”
Lawrence, who played Joe Poulter in both the Bad Education television series and the 2015 movie, spoke on the entertainment industry as a whole, saying “It’s really tough out there, really hard. There just aren’t the jobs there were.”
“It baffles me, because the creative industry is one of the biggest in the UK … and yet 70 per cent of people who work in it are unemployed,” he continued.
“That’s so wrong. It just feels like it’s not going to get any better.”
@ethandlawrence A long rant. Thinking of giving up being an actor #actor #Sad #work #rant
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Lawrence, who played the role of James in Ricky Gervais’ hit Netflix series, After Life, continued to elaborate on how the lack of recent work has impacted his financial situation: “Outside of the actual filmed evidence of what I’ve done, I don’t own anything. I’m in a constant state of financial precarity.”
He continued: “I had one of the best years of my entire life professionally, literally just a couple of years ago, and since then I’ve not worked. It’s crazy.”
Lawrence also spoke about the possibility of changing industry, saying: “I’m not too proud to go and do part-time of temp work.”
“But in my head I’m just thinking to myself, it just might be time to stop because I can’t keep living like this,” he continued. “I’m only getting older and slower and stupider.”
He continued: “While I will try and continue with this, I think there will come a point where I’m going to have to make a decision as to whether I continue doing this or not, unless things pick up.”
“You can’t rely on anything and you can’t plan anything, you can’t make plans for the future or anything like that, and I just think maybe I’m getting to the point where I can’t live like that anymore,” he added.
Lawrence’s last acting job was in the 2023 thriller miniseries Boat Story, and before that he starred in Steven Soderbergh’s comedy drama film, Magic Mike’s Last Dance.