Emma Chamberlain (0:00)

So it was announced about a month ago that I'm going to be acting in my first movie. And this is a huge plot twist. Okay. Pun intended. It's a massive plot twist in my life to all of you because you've all known me for my entire career as a YouTuber and podcaster who's themselves. That's what I built my career on. But it's also a plot twist to me, okay? I didn't pursue a career in entertainment to one day be an actor. That was never the goal. In fact, I remember when my career on YouTube really started to pick up, and it became time to sort of build a team around me. Managers, agents, whatever. And I remember being in meetings with agents and them just saying to me, so you want to be an actor, right? And I was like, no, I want to be a YouTuber. This is not a stepping stone for me. This is the final destination. I want to be a YouTuber. And I remember being so frustrated. Like, why does acting seem to be the final destination? Like, what's wrong with just being a YouTuber? And I became very stubborn about this. And I feel like these early experiences in my career of being told that I should be an actor, that that should be my final destination. I feel like these moments made me stubborn and completely closed off to the idea of acting. And so for the last few years, I've been like, I'm never going to be an actor. I have no interest in acting. And leave me alone. You know, Like, I just want to be myself. That's. That's what I built my career on. That's what I want to do for the rest of my life. I don't want to pretend to be something else that goes against the entire ethos of my career thus far in. And stop trying to tell me what to do. That's the other thing. I'm very rebellious, and when people tell me what to do, I tend to do the opposite. So I think it wasn't helpful that in the very beginning I was told I should be an actor. I was so closed off to the idea of acting that I said I'd never do it. Like, that was my answer to the qu. Like, if I was in an interview and I was asked, would you ever consider acting? My answer was, no, absolutely not. And now I'm going to be in a movie. Okay, so what happened? Right. How did that happen? Well, that's what we're going to discuss today. Okay. How I went from saying never to saying yes. I briefly paused this episode to let you know that this episode of Anything Goes is presented by Temptations Cat Treats. Your cat will come running for the perfectly irresistible Temptations Creamy Puree and Temptations Lickable Spoon Cat Treats. The best time to feed Lickable Cat Treats to your cat is anytime. Feed by hand for a playful moment, in a bowl, for a creamy treat, or as a topper to make mealtime fun. Visit temptationstreats.com to learn more. Now let's get back to the episode. Let's go back to those meetings. In the beginning of my career, when I was building out a team, being told that the ultimate goal in entertainment should be to be an actor really made me angry. It bothered me. And I really don't think that these agents meant any harm. I really do think that they're trained classically to be like, well, digital entertainment, modern entertainment is a stepping stone to traditional entertainment. You know, this is all that they know. This is the world that they live in, acting being the pinnacle. And I do not think that they were trying to insult me or steer me in the wrong direction. I really do genuinely think that they just couldn't comprehend the idea that being a YouTuber, being a podcaster, being yourself is a sustainable career. You know, I think it's, at the time, it was so new. It was, it was incomprehensible. But as a 17, 18 year old, I was stubborn. And so this sort of pissed me off. And I eventually did get an agent who completely understood my dream of just being myself and that being my job. And we have a beautiful relationship. I absolutely adore this woman. She's still my agent to this day. And then as my career progressed over the years, I started getting asked more and more like, would you ever act? Would you ever act? By journalists in interviews and actors and directors in this industry that I meet at events. You know, I started getting asked more and more. Being asked in a, in a more sweet sort of way like that made me rethink it again in a less rebellious sort of way. And I came to the same conclusion, but it was a bit different. I, I didn't want to be an actor, not because I was rebelling against agents that told me I should. I didn't want to act because, number one, I wasn't passionate about it. Also, I grew up watching YouTube. I didn't grow up watching movies as much. I absolutely watched movies and I absolutely adore movies. But I actually have a complicated relationship with movies. I often sit down to watch a movie and I hate it. And then I feel trapped. And so there Are a lot of movies that shaped me as a child, shaped me as a young adult, have seriously moved me that, you know, I'm obsessed with. But I don't know, like, my relationship with movies has always been complicated. And growing up, I watched YouTube because I didn't have cable until I was like 15, maybe 14, 15, maybe 12, I don't know. But anyway, I didn't have cable television. I went to the library and got DVDs, which, you know, sometimes I'd get movies and stuff. But I ended up really loving YouTube and I. That became my main source of entertainment. And in a way, you know, the way that a lot of young people feel about movie stars, I felt about YouTubers. You know, my. The. The posters I wanted to put up on my walls were not of Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio. I wanted to put posters on my wall of Rhett and link the youtubers. Do you know what I'm saying? I grew up passionate about YouTube. I just never felt passionate about movies. And so that was one reason why I didn't want to act. Reason number two was because I didn't want to get nepotismed in. Now, I'm not a nepo baby, okay? My parents are not famous. They're not in the entertainment industry. They're not in actually any industry that would benefit me in my career at all. My mom used to manage an electricity company and then managed, like, she was like a manager, an office manager for different companies. My dad was an electrician and then later became a painter, okay? I did not benefit from nepotism. However, in a weird way, I have my own form of nepotism with myself, okay? Because I built a career on YouTube, and now I'm a public figure in a way. If I were to want to enter into another industry that's adjacent to mine, acting with music, theater, Broadway, like all of these different, you know, forms of entertainment. If I wanted to enter into those industries, it's going to be much easier for me to do that now than it would be if I was just starting from scratch, right? So technically, I'm not benefiting from nepotism. Technically, I have arrived at the place that I've arrived to completely on my own. But if I wanted to enter into another space, in a way, I kind of have nepotism, but it's just my own. It's nepotism from myself, okay? I already have an agent. I have a team. I know acting agents. I know directing agents. I know writing agents. I know these people. I. I've Met them all, you know, like, I have connections now that could allow me to get involved easier. And that really bothered me as well because I take a level of pride in the way that I've built my career sort of from scratch. And the idea of using that to potentially get opportunities easier in other areas bothers me. And last but not least, I know how cutthroat acting is. I know how brutal it is memorizing all these lines, you know, doing a self tape, sending it in, getting rejection after rejection after rejection. Do doing 40 self tapes, doing 50, going into 12 auditions a week, getting rejected, rejected, rejected. And the thought that I might take the place of someone who is dedicating their life to this craft like it made me sick. And so I, I stood really firm in that for a really long time. It doesn't make sense. And these are all the reasons I had a very solid perspective on it. So how did I get to the point where I was like, all right, I'll try it. I'll dip my toe in. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Have you ever been shopping online and the website just gave you the ick? Let me tell you, that wouldn't happen if they used Squarespace. Squarespace Design intelligence empowers anyone to build beautiful, more personalized websites tailored to your unique needs. 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Billy's got your routine. Shop in store in@mybilli.com how did I go from that to saying, okay, you know what? I might Actually try this. Well, weirdly, it started with my interest in fashion. This was completely unintentional. I love fashion. I'm obsessed with fashion. I'm passionate about fashion. I have been for many, many years. But in my late teen years, I really started to get involved. I got invited to my first fashion show in Paris, Louis Vuitton. Going to that fashion show expanded my mind to the possibilities. Going to that show exposed me to a whole other dimension of fashion that I had never even paid attention to. You know, the world of how to couture. You know what I mean? I'm never going to speak with a French accent again. I'm so sorry. That was horrible. It was horrifying. Hopefully I don't get casted in any roles where I need to do a French accent, because that will happen again, and that won't, and that's not good. I started going to fashion shows. I started working with, you know, these very fancy designer brands, and. And I grew this love and passion for the art of it all. And that led me to doing more editorial photo shoots where I'm wearing wigs and doing editorial makeup with, you know, eye looks that are colorful and, you know, wild, and wearing these Runway pieces and posing in weird ways for magazines or even for my coffee company. I really fell in love with doing these sorts of editorial photo shoots, and I never really thought about why I liked it, as my love for it was developing. But in retrospect, it's clear to me that I loved getting to be a character. There was something so sort of cathartic about it for me because I had built my entire career thus far on being myself. And once I got over the cringe element of posing for the camera, I really fell in love with getting to be a character. You know, putting on these outfits, these costumes almost, if you will, and trying to embody them in a way that matches the outfit, matches, you know, the theme for the shoot. And in a lot of ways, this was sort of acting. It's obviously not acting, but it was 10% of what acting is. You know, putting on a costume and changing your behavior to match that costume. I just grew a real love for this. And, you know, over the years, I've. I've done more and more of it. It dawned on me at a certain point, probably a year and a half ago or maybe two years ago now, I was like, I love doing this so much. How can I chase this feeling like, what else can I do that sort of is like this? Because this is clearly very fun for Me. And it dawned on me that what I like about it is being a character, not being myself. Maybe I shouldn't have said never about all of the acting stuff. Maybe I'll give it a try. And it's interesting because, you know, it was really hard for me to wrap my head around the idea of me giving acting a try but not being a TV buff, a movie buff. I was like, is this okay? Like, am I allowed to dip my toe into this if I'm not technically the textbook actor who, you know, is obsessed with watching every single television show, studying every single director? Like, I don't know if I'm allowed to be interested in this. My interest in acting has nothing to almost do with the final product, if that makes sense. I like the feeling of not being myself. I like the feeling of embodying someone else. And then as I started thinking about this more, it dawned on me that something that I'm also passionate about is analyzing and discussing people. There's nothing I love more than analyzing people and discussing people. I find other human beings so fascinating. And a great example of this is on the weekends. There's nothing I love more than sitting at a cafe and just watching people. I love people watching. I think a lot of people love people watching. It's a very normal human thing to enjoy. We find other humans fascinating. But I will say that I've always been a little bit more interested in other people than, say, my parents or, you know, my friends. I'm, like, obsessed with analyzing people and figuring people out, connecting all the dots, you know, why is somebody like this? Why do they do the things that they do? What traits are connected? You know, I don't know. Like, I've always been obsessed with analyzing people. And a lot of what acting is is having an understanding of people to the point where if you're assigned a character, you can create that character in your head and then be it, you know, I think me being somebody who loves to analyze people goes hand in hand with acting, right? So it really. I was like, oh, my God, what is happening? A few years ago, I'm having these epiphanies, and I'm like, what is actually happening? Like, what is happening? I literally. This is the one thing I said I'd never do, actually. I also said I'd never make music. And now I'm learning how to play guitar. So I'm fully just a walk. I'm a hypocrite. I'm a liar. I'm a hypocrite. I like. I mean, I'M not writing any music. I can barely play a song on guitar right now. But I don't know, I was so against doing anything outside of my little entertainment bubble. YouTube, podcast, whatever. Like, I was so against it that it was really uncomfortable to be having this epiphany that I am actually interested in this thing. And so I started auditioning.