Exclusive: Sarah Tucker interviews President of Equity Lynda Rooke

Sarah Tucker

Actors are expected to sell themselves, survive rejection, live with uncertainty, improvise when the plan collapses, read a room, build teams quickly and somehow remain interesting while doing all of it, which sounds remarkably like entrepreneurship except that entrepreneurs are generally allowed to admit they would quite like to be paid.

Entrepreneurs are forever being advised to become more agile, resilient, authentic, collaborative, emotionally intelligent and comfortable with uncertainty, usually at conferences where somebody has produced a PowerPoint to explain how to do it; actors have been practising precisely these skills for centuries, often while somebody else explains that exposure is a perfectly respectable alternative to money.

This autumn, at 62, I am about to start a year-long-acting course, while my son Tom O’Reilly, at 27, enters his final year at Central, which has produced the mildly surreal situation in which mother and son are entering different ends of the same profession at almost exactly the same time. When I interviewed Lynda Rooke, actor and President of Equity, I therefore wanted to know not simply how acting works, but what it knows.

Rooke is particularly well qualified to answer, because she has spent decades observing the performing arts from both sides of the curtain, appearing in Hollyoaks, Coronation Street, Mike Leigh’s Naked, Pat and Margaret, All Creatures Great and Small and a long list of theatre and television productions, while simultaneously becoming one of the industry’s most persistent campaigners. She has now been re-elected for a third term as Equity President, making her the longest-serving female President in the union’s history, although she is revealingly reluctant to describe herself as powerful, preferring “spokesperson”, which may itself tell us rather more about leadership than several shelves of airport business books.

There is nothing especially presidential about Rooke when we speak, in the best possible sense, because she is funny, candid and refreshingly uninterested in varnishing an answer until it resembles a press release. Recalling three years in the early days of Hollyoaks, when she ran the pub, she remembers strangers greeting her in supermarkets because, as she puts it, “I’ve been in their front rooms,” adding that she knew what they watched on Sunday morning: “Hangover Television”. It is a small anecdote, but an instructive one, because acting begins with understanding something entrepreneurs routinely spend fortunes trying to manufacture: familiarity, connection and the peculiar intimacy created when somebody feels they know you before you know them.

Her own career almost did not happen, because when the 18-year-old Rooke told the headmistress of Lancaster Girls’ Grammar School that, despite being expected to study geography, she wanted to act, the response was not exactly follow your dream. Her headmistress told her she was foolish and, as Rooke remembers it, essentially instructed her not to “darken my door again”. She went instead to the careers office in her home town of Lancaster, just down the road from her school, where she found somebody who took her ambition seriously, obtained information about drama schools and eventually went to East 15. A separate encounter in Preston proved crucial: someone there ticked a box confirming that she could receive a grant, without which, she says, she could not have gone.

The person she remembers most warmly is not the woman who tried to stop her but the anonymous person who enabled her, because somebody in that careers system took her ambition seriously enough to help. Were she ever to win a major award, Rooke says she would want to thank that unknown individual in Preston because they gave her an opportunity, and the opportunity mattered because she could obtain a grant; without it, she says unequivocally, she could not have gone.

Entrepreneurship has developed a rather romantic relationship with the myth of self-creation, as though successful people emerge entirely through force of character, preferably having begun with £17 in a garage, while the less photogenic infrastructure of opportunity is quietly edited from the story. Rooke certainly possessed confidence, optimism and bloody-mindedness, but she also encountered one person, one system and one grant at the right moment, and that combination converted potential into possibility.

When I ask whether the young Lynda Rooke could afford to become an actor today, her answer arrives without theatrical hesitation: “No.”

That may be the most important business question in the entire conversation, because we talk incessantly about discovering talent while quietly constructing systems in which talent must increasingly finance its own discovery. Rooke points to the repertory theatres, small-scale touring companies and theatre-in-education work through which performers of her generation could learn their craft while actually working, describing a route travelled by performers including Julie Walters, Sue Johnston and Maxine Peake; much of that infrastructure has contracted dramatically, which means the aspiring performer increasingly needs not merely talent but financial endurance, accommodating parents, cheap housing, helpful contacts and an unusually robust relationship with baked beans.

“If you come from a family where, if you’re going through a precarious period where work dries up, you’re safe because there’s financial support,” Rooke says, “then they will survive in the industry,” whereas somebody from a working-class background without those links “will find it much, much harder.”

An industry does not necessarily select the most talented people when survival itself has an entry fee; it may simply select those capable of remaining in the waiting room longest, while the people who disappear from the system cease conveniently to be available as evidence.

Business understands incubators when they contain technology companies, laboratories when they contain scientists and R&D when somebody is developing a pharmaceutical compound, yet becomes strangely coy about applying the same principle to culture. Rooke invokes Mike Leigh, whose process depends upon exploration, improvisation and time, then points to Catherine Johnson developing work within the subsidised environment of Bristol Old Vic before eventually writing Mamma Mia!; the commercial result of that particular piece of artistic experimentation scarcely requires a spreadsheet to establish its return on investment.

“You do need time,” Rooke says. “R and D is about that.” In science, nobody finds research and experimentation particularly peculiar, whereas the arts are frequently expected to know exactly what they are making before they have made it. Sometimes, she adds, “you will have failure. Sometimes it won’t work,” which is not an unfortunate side effect of experimentation but part of the mechanism through which experimentation works.

We appear perfectly relaxed about venture capitalists funding ten companies in the expectation that most might fail, while an unsuccessful piece of theatre can still be discussed as though somebody has accidentally set fire to Arts Council England.

Rooke understands failure rather better than that, describing the “humdinger slaps in the face” she has experienced throughout her career and admitting that professional disappointments have sometimes left her sobbing into a pillow for considerably longer than the motivational literature recommends. “They’re still painful,” she says, refusing the modern requirement that every disaster should be retrospectively rebranded as a wonderful learning opportunity before breakfast.

What matters is what happens afterwards. Those experiences have taught her to think, “I’ve copped you, but when I come back, I’ll come back stronger,” and sometimes to call out behaviour she believes is wrong even when doing so makes her unpopular. When I ask what got her through the disappointments, she later remembered something her husband pointed out: “didn’t you mention that’s why you did your 2 degrees?” She says that focusing on her studies gave her something nobody could take away: “it was something that was absolutely mine.” The achievements centred her and, she says, helped her mental health when things became challenging. The other anchor was her passion for long-distance running. Equity talks about moving “from resilience to resistance”, an important distinction because resilience has acquired an almost absurdly virtuous reputation in business: sometimes resilience is admirable, but sometimes it is merely the mechanism by which a bad system persuades good people to endure it for longer.

Rooke describes performers historically tolerating sexual harassment, underpayment, unpaid work and unsafe practices because refusing might mean losing the next opportunity. “We have to start saying I am valued as a person, as a worker, and I deserve to be paid,” she tells me, extending the point to inappropriate auditions and the pressure that can persuade young performers to take risks because another actor is waiting behind them.

The question of money becomes still more interesting because Rooke studied economics after becoming an actor, giving her an unusual perspective on the gulf between the elegant model and the inconvenient human being expected to inhabit it.

Economics, she says, “lacks the human factor”, particularly “the precarity and the emotional responses to things that humans possess”, because a model can show somebody earning, paying the mortgage and behaving rationally while completely missing the moment when that same person thinks, “I can’t do that anymore,” or decides to take their life in another direction. Ultimately, she argues, pure economic systems fail because “humans aren’t” pure systems: “Humans are multifaceted.”

It is an unexpectedly profound observation for entrepreneurship, where people are still frequently placed inside models as though they were reasonably predictable units who can be motivated by a bonus, a mission statement and perhaps free granola in the kitchen. The market can price labour, but it cannot fully price meaning; the spreadsheet can calculate what somebody earns, but not when they will decide the earnings are no longer worth the life required to obtain them.

Actors present this problem in particularly concentrated form because their relationship with value is unusually personal. “Actors have been made to feel that somehow they’re lucky, that what they do as a job is a hobby, and it’s a bit of fun,” Rooke says, which makes many uncomfortable asserting the most basic principles of commercial exchange: “I need to be paid. I need to be respected. I need dignity at work.”

Those three sentences could form a remarkably useful manifesto for the self-employed generally, because the modern creative economy has become rather ingenious at making people feel vulgar for discussing money while being perfectly relaxed about making money from them.

Rooke sees a psychological trap at work: performers feel lucky because fifty or a hundred other people might have wanted the role, so they become afraid of asking for flexibility, decent conditions or appropriate remuneration because they fear “they won’t be asked again”. The imbalance is intensified by concentrated gatekeeping, nepotism and access, and she is emphatic on one point which anyone romanticising the profession should hear: “It’s not a meritocracy. I wish it was, but it’s not.”

This leads to a phrase Equity uses to describe parts of the contemporary casting infrastructure: a “tax on hope”. Rooke is careful to point out that the phrase was first penned by her Vice President, Jackie Clune.

It extends far beyond acting. Wherever large numbers of ambitious people compete for scarce opportunity, an ancillary economy emerges to sell them proximity to that opportunity: subscriptions, directories, courses, photographs, showcases, premium listings, introductions and access, until the unsuccessful applicant has quietly become the customer.

Rooke is particularly exercised about the power concentrated around casting infrastructure, arguing that performers feel they cannot be considered for professional work without paying to remain visible. She describes the resulting dynamic with characteristic economy: “It is a tax on hope. It’s a con. It’s saying put yourself there… It’s like the lottery.” Her objection is not to investing in yourself, which she actively encourages, but to confusing investment with endless payment to gatekeepers who monetise aspiration itself.

Her objection is not to investing in yourself, which she actively encourages, but to confusing investment with endless payment to gatekeepers who monetise aspiration itself. The entrepreneurial economy has plenty of comparable industries, from would-be authors paying to be noticed to young founders buying access to networks and workers purchasing ever more credentials in the hope that the next qualification will finally make them employable; hope is an excellent human quality and, unfortunately, an equally excellent recurring-revenue model.

Actors are therefore entrepreneurs, but unusually vulnerable ones, because the product, salesperson and inventory happen to be the same human being.

There is another inversion here, however, because while actors may need to become slightly better entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs might profitably become slightly better actors, although preferably not in the sense currently demonstrated in certain corporate presentations.

“Acting’s reacting,” Rooke tells me, and this may be the single most useful leadership lesson she offers. Actors have to listen because their next action depends upon what another human being has just done; great performance is not twenty people waiting politely for their opportunity to deliver a personal mission statement, but an exchange in which everyone changes what everyone else can do.

“Somebody says something to you, and on the back of that, the idea is that you react to what they say,” she explains, insisting that acting is fundamentally social: “Don’t work in a bubble. It’s about actually being part of a group.”

The relevance to leadership is uncomfortable because organisations often reward precisely the opposite behaviour, promoting the person who appears decisive, speaks first and longest and can convert uncertainty into a sentence containing the words strategic vision. Rooke distinguishes confidence from competence more brutally: “Competence comes from graft and understanding rather than patting yourself on the back,” while senior leaders are particularly vulnerable to being surrounded by people who “blow smoke up your backside”.

Her question to leaders is devastatingly simple: “Do you get the truth?” Do you discover that the product is wrong, that the company is being badly run, or that somebody several levels beneath you is abusive, or does status insulate you from precisely the information required to make competent decisions?

That is acting as an entrepreneurial discipline, not because it teaches somebody to pretend, but because good acting makes pretending increasingly difficult; you have to notice, respond, adjust and surrender the line reading you had beautifully prepared when somebody opposite you gives you something unexpected.

When I ask what she would teach if every future entrepreneur had to attend one acting class, Rooke returns immediately to interaction, trust and ensemble, arguing that what matters is “what you offer as an individual, but how you play within a group”. During Jane Eyre, she recalls spending more than three hours on a difficult sloping wooden set where performance also meant watching colleagues, giving hands, helping with costumes and trusting other people physically as well as artistically.

Her advice to entrepreneurs is gloriously free of management jargon: “Know that you are not the sole thing there,” because even if you occupy the top of a hierarchy, the people below you have to trust and respect you; operate as a “sole agent”, she warns, and “it’s a bloody lonely position to be in”, while those treated badly during your ascent may be rather less sympathetic during the descent.

Motherhood taught her a parallel lesson about organisations, although in this case the lesson was how determinedly organisations can maintain stupid systems simply because they have inherited them.

Rooke remembers arriving at a BBC audition with her second child, whom she was breastfeeding, and asking whether somebody could hold the baby while she read for the role. The response was: “Well, this is all okay, but what if I gave you the job? Who’d look after the baby then?”

For Rooke, motherhood exposed “the inflexibility of the industry around life, parenting, caring”, including the assumption that professional commitment should swallow every other human obligation. “You’re not allowed to be a wife, a mother, or a grandmother or a carer. You sort that out. It’s separate outside.”

Here again the entrepreneurial connection is wider than theatre, because organisations routinely describe structural choices as unavoidable facts of nature. Long hours and inflexible schedules are spoken of as though engraved on stone tablets rather than decided by people, and one of Rooke’s most useful challenges is whether supposedly difficult workplace problems are genuinely difficult, or merely inconvenient for those with sufficient power to solve them.

Then there is AI, which makes this conversation particularly timely.

Asked what an artificial system cannot reproduce in an actor, Rooke answers: “The soul, the emotions, the soul,” followed by “that instinct to turn on a sixpence”, to move unexpectedly between laughter and tears, to surprise and to refuse the stereotypical response. Her argument is not simply romantic resistance to technology, but something more interesting: if machines make technical competence abundant, the scarce commodity may become unpredictability, judgement, particularity and even imperfection.

AI is rapidly becoming competent at producing the expected answer, while human advantage may increasingly reside in recognising that the expected answer is the wrong question.

Rooke is equally interesting on age, because every job, she says, is “built on the back of everything else”, just as every human life accumulates experience. An older performer sits upon that experience “like a river flowing through you”, available when a role touches something genuinely lived; an avatar, by contrast, remains “trapped in time”, capable of reproducing an appearance but incapable of acquiring a history.

Perhaps this is why her great acting inspiration is Thora Hird, another northern woman whom Rooke felt was underrated for years, but whose performances could contain repression, disappointment, humour and dignity without announcing any of them with fluorescent arrows. Rooke particularly remembers Hird conveying working-class pain while maintaining dignity, emotions pressed down rather than displayed, and she recalls thinking that if anyone deserved the grand honours routinely scattered around the profession, it was Hird for the consistency and depth of her characterisation.

When I ask what a 27-year-old entering acting and somebody beginning again around 60 have in common, Rooke does not reach for the comforting language of reinvention; instead, she says both are vulnerable. The younger performer may have more available roles but insufficient money to survive the period required to establish a career, while the older performer may possess greater financial security but encounter far fewer roles; both need networks, both can encounter nepotism and both need time to establish a body of work.

At 60, she says, “you are still able to offer characters and characterisation and stories that are still worth telling”, which feels less like encouragement than an obvious fact the industry has somehow managed to mislay.

Rooke’s presidency grew from precisely this refusal to accept that the existing arrangement must be the natural one. Her activism began around cuts to arts funding, intensified when she saw the narrowing of opportunities for middle-aged women, and expanded through campaigning over working hours, sexual harassment, pay and representation. “I’ve always been an activist,” she says, remembering the battle over small-scale touring before later becoming involved with Equity’s Women’s Committee as she watched opportunities contracting around women of her own age.

There is continuity between the actor and the activist here, because both begin by refusing the first interpretation of the situation. The headmistress says acting is foolish; Rooke asks somebody else. The industry says long hours are inevitable; she asks why. Performers are told they should be grateful; she asks why gratitude should replace payment. Gatekeepers say this is simply how casting works; she asks who benefits from it.

What looks from one angle like bloody-mindedness looks from another like the elementary entrepreneurial habit of refusing to confuse an established practice with an immutable fact.

Her own journey began because people at crucial moments took an 18-year-old girl’s ambition seriously: a careers office in Lancaster helped open the route, while a person in Preston enabled the grant that made drama school possible. It continued because subsidised structures gave her somewhere to learn, survived because failure did not persuade her to leave, and eventually brought her to a presidency in which she still insists that power is less interesting than representation.

This is leadership as network rather than throne, and it informs her frustration at the political undervaluing of the creative industries. The performing arts, she argues, are an “economic powerhouse”, generating money not simply through tickets or productions but through hospitality, nightlife, tourism, national reputation and all the secondary spending that rarely appears on the theatre’s own balance sheet.

Her husband works on All Creatures Great and Small, in which Rooke herself once played what she cheerfully describes as “a grumpy farmer”, and she sees Americans travelling to Grassington because they want to inhabit, however briefly, a world first encountered on television. “That money would not be coming if that show wasn’t made,” she points out.

Britain still seems oddly reluctant to understand this economic multiplier: television drama can simultaneously be storytelling, employment, intellectual property, tourism marketing, skills development, export value and soft power, yet we persist in separating “the arts” from “the economy” as though actors perform in an ethereal realm where nobody needs lunch.

There is perhaps the final entrepreneurial lesson, because the mythology of both acting and entrepreneurship remains curiously addicted to the heroic individual: the star, the founder, the visionary, the person whose photograph is larger than everybody else’s on the website.

Rooke’s career suggests almost the opposite, because great acting requires other actors, viable careers require functioning ecosystems, creativity requires somewhere safe enough to fail, leadership requires people willing to tell you when you are wrong, and talent requires enough economic oxygen to remain alive before anybody notices it.

Her own journey began because one person in Preston did not laugh at an 18-year-old girl’s ambition, continued because subsidised structures gave her somewhere to learn, survived because failure did not persuade her to leave, and eventually brought her to a presidency in which she still insists that power is less interesting than representation.

At 62, as I prepare to walk into an acting class while my 27-year-old son enters his final year of professional training, I find that prospect unexpectedly reassuring, because neither of us is really starting from nothing; he brings youth, training and possibility, while I bring six decades of mistakes, observations, loss, reinvention and all the other material no algorithm has yet found a convincing way to download.

The business world likes to call that baggage, while Lynda Rooke might call it the river underneath you, and I am beginning to suspect that the actor has the better business model.