Ex-agent Kelly Andrews unlocks the behind-the-scenes world of an agent’s daily working life and shares expert advice to help you build a winning relationship with your own agent.
In this episode of the Spotlight Podcast, Business affairs consultant and professional coach Kelly Andrews joins us in the Spotlight studio to shed light on all the work agents do behind the scenes to look after their performer clients and find them work.
A veteran of the entertainment industry, Kelly previously worked as an agent and was the Co-Chair of the Personal Managers’ Association (PMA). She’s now a business affairs consultant and professional coach, sharing her expertise and offering support to agents and helping them become “safeguarding superheroes.”
With 30 years in the industry and a self-profession for being a “nerd” about the contractual side of the business, who better to share an insight into the inner world of an agent’s working life?
Stylised headshot for Business affairs consultant and professional coach, Kelly Andrews.
In this episode, you’ll hear Kelly discuss everything you ever wanted to know about how agents operate. From researching new production rumours to maintaining relationships with casting directors, take a listen to Kelly’s insight into the working life of an agent. Plus there’s advice for establishing an effective relationship with your own agent.
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Full Transcript:
Hi, Kelly! Thank you for appearing on the Spotlight Podcast. Could you start by telling us a bit about yourself and your background in the creative industries?
Kelly Andrews: I could. I’m sure nearly everybody has heard it before, but I’m the daughter of an actress and she’s been quite successful in her career. I never wanted to act at all – I mean really didn’t. So, through her connections at Stratford East, I came up, like lots of people in our community did, in their local theatre. That was my local theatre, and I did backstage hanging around and all that when I was a kid and then went directly to Mountview for their technical theatre course, their stage manager course, which I loved. I suppose that was my university. We didn’t get degrees then in those days for going to drama school, but yeah, it was amazing. And I did a few stage management jobs, touring West End, but I really quickly found out it wasn’t for me.
I really liked to sleep in my own bed – I think that’s what it comes down to. I’m a creature of routine and I like some control over those routines and, actually, touring was just a bit too random for me. So, like lots of actors, I decided I needed to make a change, and I was doing temp jobs in offices and things in between stage management jobs while I worked out what the move was. And then it turned out the move was into agenting, because one of my temp jobs was answering the phone at an agent’s office quite quickly and I never looked back. And here we are 30 years later.
I’ve loved it. I’ve loved every single second of my career, really. Well, except one thing which we’re not going to talk about today because it’s so depressing. Except that one thing, I’ve had a most amazing 30 years. I’ve loved every second of it.
Natasha Raymond: It’s great that you identified that you love this industry. Maybe the acting path wasn’t for you, but you still managed to find a niche in it that you could exist in.
Kelly Andrews: Yeah, it’s been extraordinary. I never wanted to act, but I guess because my mother is an actress, my focus has always been about what’s right for the talent, what’s good for the talent, almost to the detriment of everything else, including my own business model as an agent, really. If that’s what they need to do, we do that.
Natasha Raymond: You’re here today to talk to us about agents and how they work and operate. Everyone listening hopefully has an agent or knows what an agent does, but I think there’s lots of parts of agents that they don’t realise happen, so I’m hoping you can shed some light on that for us today.
Kelly Andrews: We’ll try.
First, could you tell us a bit about your own experience of being an agent?
Kelly Andrews: Well, I think I was very fortunate in becoming an agent. I became an agent, or at least worked in an agent’s office, at the time when there was no email, no internet. As fabulous as you were very kind to say I look today, I am actually now getting on a bit, and so that’s all actually true. It was fax machines, no email, phone, memo pads with sort of carbon copies for giving out messages and suggesting talent was a manual process. You did the phone call and then you physically posted the headshots and CVs out. I know that sounds Dickensian to younger people today, but as busy as it was, there was time in the day because every step of the process was slowed down. If you did phone suggestions and then you posted the suggestions to the casting director, there’s a three-day interval there while those suggestions go forward.
So I had time to learn the job, really learn it, and that was amazing because nobody likes to go to work not knowing what they’re doing. My first two bosses appreciated that. Jonathan Altaras had a plan for training me, and I’ll never forget that. He said I would start working for him in the accounts department because he wanted me to be able to look at his completed, finished deals from the contract as the money was coming in at the end. He said, “Because in that way, you’ll learn both to read the contract a bit, but also, what any actor is worth for any number of days in a film project or a TV project or whatever, based on my deal because I’ve done them and I’m experienced.” He said, “So, you will know what actor X is worth for this job at this point in their career, this status, this level of profile.” He said, “And that’s where you start.”
And I did it. It’s extraordinary how that skill becomes ingrained. You do it enough, it becomes ingrained. Then I went to Pippa Markham – legendary Pippa Markham – and she saw in me a skill for contractual minutiae. And so, she took what I’d already learned in my time with Jonathan and built on that and converted that to knowing what deals are from the verbal deal, converting the verbal deal to the paper, which is then the cement that Jonathan had built on.
I have a strong nerd lurking inside me, so that wasn’t really a problem, but I loved the obscure clauses. I loved that. I loved that there was a secondary way to advocate and protect actors behind the deal at the front, but then there’s all this other stuff. That was my training. Then I opened my own agency and, frankly, danced into partnership later with Carrie Simcox when that opportunity knocked. We had a very, very happy time together.
Carrie was a different style of agent than any of those I’d worked with. By that time, I felt that I was me plus some of Jonathan, some of Pippa and was sort of in my head. I guess I thought, if I’d thought about it at all, that I was a formed agent. But actually, then I went to work with Carrie and I watched how Carrie did things and so on. And in the end, this is what we do, we just steal the best bits of everybody. So, my agenting style became Johnny’s, Pippa’s and Carrie’s. Carrie is in there too, because in the end, you see how other people [work] and you go, “That’s a useful tool. Oh, they said it that way, that’s quite…” And before you know where you are, I’ve stolen all their best bits and Kelly-fied it. That was my experience of being an agent – I never stopped learning. The whole time, I never stopped learning.
Natasha Raymond: It sounds like, when you were learning, it was hands-on. They got you involved, you got to be part of all these scenarios.
Kelly Andrews: I think most agents are like that in their offices. There’s so much, and now with the advance of technology and the speeding up of the day, I’m pretty sure the agents don’t have time to just go, “Just sit here and learn this.” I’m pretty sure all of their team members are working flat out and trying to absorb it all at the same time because there’s so much to do.
You’ve touched on a few things that you did for your clients when you were an agent. Could you talk about those things? I’m sure there’s a lot of safeguarding that goes on behind the scenes that performers don’t know that their agent is doing.
Kelly Andrews: What I thought would be really helpful is to take you through a single job from the very first sniff of it right through to the end of it. And then the listeners can imagine that being multiplied by all the jobs there are going on at once and remembering that the agent is doing every component of that on a different job at a different time. But I think it’s quite helpful to have one structure to come back to.
So, basically – and it’s become clearer to me the longer I’m not an agent in my new life – agents are safeguarding superheroes. That’s kind of silly and stupid and also quite current, because it goes with the current obsession with franchise film and television and that kind of content. Here’s why I think we are. So, let’s start right at the beginning with a job. An agent will – and forgive me, this probably is an agent hearing about this more than an unrepresented actor at this early stage – an agent might hear about a job in development.
Let’s take what we now are all calling Bridgerton. Let’s take the announcement in 2018 that Shondaland is going to go into a production slate with Netflix. And of the things they’re going to do, they’re going to do a TV series based on Julia Quinn’s Regency romance novels. And at that time, they were muttering, ‘currently called Untitled Bridgerton project’. It was in the trades, it was in Deadline. The article is still there on Deadline’s website. And so, an agent immediately goes, “I know nothing about that. Julia Quinn’s Regency what? I haven’t read, I don’t know.” And they charge into reading. And that is quite funny because I remember so often when the Game of Thrones deal was announced between George R.R. Martin and HBO, I got on the train, and every time I got on the train that week, I saw an agent reading a copy of the books.
I’d go, “Oh, hi.” And they’d all be like this on the tube reading the first book because it wasn’t something we’d naturally done. So, the same thing happened a bit with Bridgerton, because you want to know all the things that won’t be in the script to help you pinpoint exactly the best people to suggest. Then finally, sometime later, you hear it’s actually greenlit, it’s got a name or whatever, and you might find out who’s actually casting it. So, then you start doing that, “Oh, I heard you’ve been attached to that project. Are you?” And you start the process of pushing, asking if you can see the scripts, which in the modern era is a bit of a problem because of the non-disclosure agreements, but that’s the job – we start asking.
Then, eventually, the breakdowns start coming in, which is the bit that passes across Spotlight’s desk all the time. But at the other end, it passes across your system, lands on my desk and I go, “Oh wait a minute, what is that? What is Vauxhall? What is this Project Vauxhall? I don’t know what that is.” And immediately, then, the agent is off on some mystery tour of things that we are required to prove or certify that no one else cares about. The actors don’t. If I phone an actor up and go, “You’re going to be met for Shondaland’s new thing,” it’s like, “Great, I’ll just go. And also, my agent’s had to go, and also I want to work and great, off I go. And they’ve said the magic word ‘Netflix’ – it’s great.”
But the problem is, for us, the Employment Agencies Act of 1973, which governs how agents operate, and also then a subsequent sort of section of that regulation that came into being in 2003, requires generally, a load of stuff that I’m supposed to know. I’m supposed to be able to provide the identity of the employer is supposed to be known before I affect an introduction between the work seeker, which is the client, and the employer, which is either Shondaland or Netflix or whoever, in any project. So, there it is – I’m supposed to know.
I do know Vauxhall, Bridgerton, Vauxhall Gardens, Regency England, Regency London – I’m a history nerd, I didn’t need to do the research. But, actually, what you need is the Deadline article from 2018 filed away. You need the follow-up article where they actually announce it’s going into production and it is going to be called Bridgerton. And then, the final bit is that kind of like, ‘I so certify in the regs that I know this is Bridgerton’, even though the breakdown says ‘Vauxhall’, the contracts will say ‘Vauxhall’, because that’s the company they’ve started.
So, there are little bits that agents are doing in the background all the time with projects that arrive. They’ve got code names, they’ve got secret names. An Avengers movie is never called that when it’s casting. There’s loads of stuff that’s happening and it’s not called what it’s supposed to be called and it is not called what it will be called when it airs. And the agent really is, by the regs, required to have all that stuff pinned down. I don’t necessarily bother my client with it, but I’m supposed to know it. And so, that makes this kind of background work that people don’t think we’re doing.
Then come the suggestions, the bit that Spotlight sees happening again across their platform. Agents are doing that initial click of the faces on their portfolio. I don’t know if people still believe that agents do this, but I hear so many times actors going, “Oh, my agent just clicks my face.” And honestly, that’s not what we’re doing. We have clicked their face, and then we’ve done a call and an email and a push and we might be talking about them at the theatre or we might be doing this or that or the other thing wherever we go.
So, we are trying to push that suggestion forward all the time. Then the audition comes. Here’s some insights for young actors particularly: the audition comes – you’ll never hear an agent tell you it’s an ‘audition’. Never. We call them ‘meetings’ or ‘interviews’ because it’s a safeguarding thing. ‘Audition’ is a word that might be considered hostile, it might be considered combative and not creative, and also implies a hierarchy between collaborative contributors. That’s not helpful for the actor to go in feeling diminished at the audition. So, the agent doesn’t say ‘audition’, the agent says, “You’ve got a meeting.” Much more friendly, because a meeting could be a meeting over a cup of coffee. I don’t think anybody really believes the con, but it’s the game the agent starts to play. It’s a jargon pivot that we do automatically.
The regs and the rules are a wider legal form of safeguarding. Do I know what Vauxhall is? Yes, I’ve done my work. This, then, is the start of the softer level of safeguarding to prepare the actor for the audition – don’t make it more difficult. The same thing could be said, soft safeguarding, of reviewing self-tapes. Agents do it. People think we don’t – we do. And sometimes, you have unpleasant conversations because sometimes you have to phone back and go, “I can’t send it.” I mean, for all sorts of reasons. The dog’s licking its bits in the back of the shot and you didn’t notice. I truly saw a video like that once or whatever it is, technical or maybe creative, but agents do that.
Furthermore, we’ll then chase the caster for answers about that video tape and about that piece of auditioning or whatever in an effort to absolutely manage the expectations of the artist. We will be trying to keep the actor calm and ready for the news in whichever way it is. ‘Calm’ came out wrong – that sounds like I’m suggesting actors are losing their minds all the time, which is not the truth. But there is a desire to be able to provide feedback and so you’re trying to acquire that for your actors.
Then, finally, let’s say we receive the offer. Hurrah, we’re off to the races! And then the next bit that I think agents do that people know we do is the deal, money and terms. That can be quite specific and quite simple actually, to some degree. The dates are the dates, production control the dates. We do an exact monetary deal. We are always pushing that up as best we can. The days of really getting huge uplifts on a deal, I think we’re waving them goodbye, it’s little uplifts now. And then, obviously, the more important the role in the piece, the bigger the other things you have to negotiate – billing, travel, overseas accommodation. There are other things.
Oh, hang on a minute – there’s another thing I need to know. I need to ask about health and safety. Can you believe it? I’m an agent, I don’t care about health and safety, I don’t. But apparently I’m supposed to, according to the regs. Again, the regs require me to understand and ask questions of production about, “We’ve read the script, or my client has read the script, this is going to happen. Are they going to be safe?” And the really peculiar thing about the regs is the regs don’t care about the answer.
So, I’m wasting all this oxygen asking. I ask production, they go, “No, Kelly, that snake is actually going to attack your client. We’ve got the most poisonous snake in the world. It’s going to stick its fangs in your client’s eye and suck its eyeball out for real, because that’s what the scene needs.” And I go, “Right, fine.” The regs require me to tell that to my client, and then my client makes the informed decision about whether to do that or not do that. That’s the legal safeguarding. Naturally, the soft safeguarding, if you like, is Kelly loses her mind in the office and screams at the producer and suggests that of course, you can’t have a poisonous snake on the set. Could you talk to me about what aesthetics you’ve got for sucking the eye out? But there is that conflict at two layers of things all the time where, “Did I ask, did they answer? Did I tell the client? Did the client say they’re going ahead? Great, so that’s all fine over there now let’s do the deal about that thing.” So, there’s lots of bits in the background, I think, that we are doing that people don’t think.
Then the contractual paperwork arrives and then quite often, that’s the beginning of what really is quite a fight. The contractual paperwork seldom reflects exactly what you negotiated. And so, you’re still going back going, “No, no, we agreed this fee,” or “We agreed that there wouldn’t be free post-syncing,” or whatever we agreed. And suddenly, you’re fighting it again in the paperwork. The Copyright Act, intellectual property, confidentiality clauses – they all have to be rephrased and reworked, so negotiated. And while technically, in this place, the rules and regs for agents are silent, they don’t require us to do any of this, this is the job. And so, we are doing some of that. Sometimes, we’ll say you need a lawyer to our clients, but other times we’re doing it all.
And then the very final thing is that you might come across six pages of options to tie your client into the job forever that wasn’t discussed at the beginning either. So, there’s a lot of stuff that has to be worked through, and the actor will probably only sign version three or four of the contract, because agent has done that many back and forwards of that many drafts.
Then the money is coming in for the actor – hurrah, at last. But the rules and regs require agents to have a designated client account where that money is safe and ringfenced. They require us to have written authorisation from the artists that we can receive that money. They require us to pay out within 10 days of receipt, which sometimes can be difficult, because big organisations will dump royalties and residuals for a bunch of people in your account and you’re like, “Well, where’s the paperwork? I can’t pay it to anyone. I don’t know who it’s for.” And we must generate all the paperwork to certify our commission charging arrangement with the client. That must all be there. That’s both legal and financial safeguarding wrapped up in another set of paperworks.
Post-production brings more of the same – scheduling, negotiating, invoicing, paying. And so, although the job description has many roles, we could say, I’m a negotiator, I’m a salesperson, I’m a this, I’m a that, or the other one, if you’re an agent, actually an agent is a safeguarder. An agent is a superhero safeguarding officer, standing there at the gate checking everything that comes past for the actor.
That’s for every single project. And don’t forget: half of it you do for the projects that don’t come to anything. I might have done all that work to have my files in order about Bridgerton and never had anybody on it. That’s unlikely when a show goes as long as Bridgerton, but you can have no clients in the first series of a show and then you’ve done all that work in case anybody got a job, because if the employment agency standards inspectorate had come, you have to have your paperwork. So, you’ve got it, the paperwork and nobody on it, and you’re like, “Oh, I can delete that now. They won’t inspect that because nobody did the job.” So, yeah, there is a lot of it and we are trying to be on top of it all the time.
Natasha Raymond: You must have such an organised system to keep on top of that.
Kelly Andrews: There are softwares out there that help agents collate the physical data related to both bits of our job and the bits that overlap with the job of the clients. So, something like the health and safety – there’s software out there that does that for agents, and there are check boxes that we can tick. But yeah, it’s quite a lot. It’s quite a lot.
I’m sure there’s also lots of tasks that the agents have to do to do with housekeeping and running the agency. Could you tell us a bit about those?
Kelly Andrews: Well, in terms of running the agency, we tend to take those rules and regs that I’ve referenced, and those rules and regs are quite clear. There are a couple of places where there are disputes about agents about how they can be read. And then, where there’s a dispute about a particular thing in the regs – like, for example, notice periods between agents and artists – where there’s a dispute, filling the void is the industry standard, what the industry considers best practice. The industry has taken interpretation A and then run all the way with it. So, there’s lots of keeping current in those kinds of things. What does the industry think about this this week or this year? So, there’s lots of that kind of involvement.
Then of course, there’s the obvious thing of just running a business. Whatever business you run, any business, any business owner – there’s all the stuff to do. There’s VAT returns, there’s tax returns, there’s bits of legislation, there’s liability insurance in case your clients visit the office because they might trip over. I don’t know what they’d trip over in my office. There’s all that sort of stuff and agents are doing that. Agents have come to their work through a creative access point primarily, too. I was an ex-stage manager. My colleague agents – many of them are actors or performers in some way who’ve made an early career change. They come from the same place that the actors come. So, all that, “Have I got public liability insurance?” stuff is wearing. And the renewals come and you go, “Oh god, are we there again already? More insurance. Oh, great.” So, yeah, there’s a lot.
Natasha Raymond: It’s quite funny, I suppose. Some people might duck out of acting and go to the agent side thinking it’s going to be simpler, and then actually, no.
Kelly Andrews: Indeed. And I think it’s a certain skill set. It really is a blending of really detail-oriented administration and reading, and then the creative bit of working with the actor and suggesting the actor and finding the right opportunities for the actor, and trying to make sure that you are, with every suggestion, pushing the actor in the direction they have asked to go. Not every job is that, but the overall mission is to get to the place the actor’s asked to get to. So, it is a blend of both things. It’s not just one thing, it’s not just either admin or creativity.
On top of all of that, there’s also promoting and talking your clients up to casting directors and just increasing the chances that they’ll get the job. Could you tell us about that side of it as well?
Kelly Andrews: Fostering relationships with sector professionals is a really big one. It’s really important. I think it’s really easy for people to assume that press nights are not really work. The actors know they’re working because they’re on the stage, they’re performing, and they’ve been rehearsing to get to this place. And I think it’s really easy to assume there’s not another kind of work going on. Agents work quite hard at those events, I have to say.
Beyond the introduction of this client who is in this project to whoever may be assembled at the press night, it’s equally important that the agent is keeping up their own relationships with casting directors, directors, producers, all those people in those rooms, because we’re always talking. I think we all know, don’t we, that in our sector, we are all quite dull. We only talk about ourselves and our art forms collectively. In this industry, I seldom meet people who want to talk about something else. We always talk about what you saw at the cinema, what you saw on television, if you enjoyed something at the theatre, what’s happening in this bit of the industry, is there a problem there, is there going to be a tariff issue now hitting the industry in the UK? We always talk about work, even when we’re all out with our pals.
And I think that’s partially because there’s a social element to what we do at press nights and in those events because, actually, we always need to be current. Being late to the party about a project or about some piece of information is not helpful for your client. Therefore, the effort is always to be in front of the curve. Do I know it? Have I seen them? And that’s often after a 10-hour day at the desk. You know that old thing Ginger Rogers famously said about Fred Astaire – ‘Well, I do everything he does, but I do it backwards and in heels’. Still being at a press night event at two in the morning or one in the morning can be quite a lot if you’ve done 10 hours at the desk all day. So, fostering those relationships is important.
Advocating for the general health of the sector is important, and I mean buoyancy health. The PMA membership are really good at this. Lots of agents work closely with Equity for the purpose of saving what’s left of our industry. There are working groups, committees. There’s some incredibly useful seminars out there, and all of that connects the artist to the industry through their agent, because their agent is doing that connection, the agent is doing all of that work. And that in turn then connects the client, even though they’re unaware of it, and perhaps even frustrated that the assistant says, “I’m sorry, she’s at a seminar this afternoon.” That can feel frustrating for the artist, but, actually, at that seminar, I might come back with a piece of information that’s so important. Agents come back with a piece of information that helps move everything forward.
I suppose I should say that social media is useful to promote clients, both specifically a specific client and collectively, and agents, I think, are always trying to wrangle the best way to achieve that. For my part, I find it’s got limited use. So much of what appears on social media is factually inaccurate. Sources of information have always to be carefully scrutinised, and the way projects and the details of who’s in them now are embargoed for such a long period of time after they’re made, that in the end, you can’t do a social media sort of push until the production have announced in their way.
You can be part of that, you can feed into that, but you can’t actually go, “Actually, my client has just finished filming on this exciting job and is available please everybody. They’ve just been playing the lead over here.” You can’t do that, because you can’t tell anybody that they were in it. Somebody smarter than me probably can tell you, “Yes, yes, Kelly is wrong. There’s loads of ways [social media] can be much, much more useful.” But for my part, I know that a lot of agencies in the UK have not yet adopted a social media marketing manager for their firm, because we are just silenced. We are gagged about so much stuff that some days you think, “I don’t know why I’m bothering. I’m reposting information that’s five days old because I wasn’t allowed to say six months ago when it would’ve been useful.”
Natasha Raymond: Has it always been that way or has that changed as the industry has evolved?
Kelly Andrews: In truth, in the early days of social media, everybody said everything, and like we always make jokes about everything, it used to be the Wild West. But now, the big companies are much more smart about what they will and won’t let you do. You can see it to a point. If you are making a major Avengers movie or a major franchise piece, you don’t want it all blown up because there’s a secret thing that they’ve cast actor X. They want to control it, and to a degree, you can understand that. But it’s quite difficult because they apply those embargoes to everybody in the cast, where actually, there might be a level of actor in the project who’s doing good work, has a nice role in it, that’s really not going to crack open a storyline and not going to reveal anything. But those embargoes are applied right the way down the call sheet.
So, you can’t say, “This client is doing this in this,” which might mean nothing to the fans because the character might be a character created just for the television or film version of it that doesn’t appear in the original source material. But you still can’t do that because you are as embargoed as the agent who looks after Hugh Jackman or Jeremy Renner or whoever.
Natasha Raymond: Which is a real shame, because obviously, Hugh Jackman doesn’t need you going around saying, “Hugh Jackman is going to be in this fantastic project.” But someone who’s playing Hugh Jackman’s character’s brother – that could be their first role. That could be huge for them progressing their career.
Kelly Andrews: And you are gagged in the same way as Hugh Jackman’s publicity team are. Social media, I don’t know. I’m not sure. It’s much more useful in my second career, which we’ll talk about later. But for agents, honestly, I don’t know.
How can performers, agents and casting directors maintain good relationships when working together?
Kelly Andrews: Honestly, it’s really not complex at all. It’s not even a secret, really. Keep the personality out of it. Remember that we’re all professionals. Agents, industry sector professionals, casting directors – I think all of those people can say, yeah, that’s what happens. I read, years ago, that the only really right deal is one where everybody walks away slightly grumpy, slightly ruffled, slightly genuinely annoyed and slightly dissatisfied because actually, that means everybody’s done their job, everybody’s argued for their corner. The whole thing is faintly unhappy at the end, and that makes it a good deal because that means everybody’s done their job. And I think that, certainly for agents and casting directors, that’s what that relationship is. We all know what we’re doing.
A casting director works largely on behalf of the production side of the fight, if you like, if there is one, which there isn’t. Casting work on behalf of production and are required to push in one direction. The agent is required to push the other way – that’s the job. They want cheap, we want more money, in a really simple equation. They might not want to see a certain client, we might want to press a little harder to try and encourage them to do that. That give and take, that backwards and forwards, it’s the job. It’s absolutely the job description. Although we are a community of really passionate, really exciting, engaged people, we do all know what our roles are. So, sometimes it can be a bit heated, but honestly, it very rarely gets really ugly. We all know what our jobs are and we are fulfilling those functions every day.
So, keeping it professional is really the beginning and the end of it, because we know. You may be personally friendly in how you go about it, but we’re not all friends. Most agents, casting directors and independent consultants like me, we will have certain agents and casting directors who are friends and others that we just are socially happy to meet, but the job is the job, and we tend not to lose our minds with each other as often as people think. So, keep it professional.
Natasha Raymond: Definitely. I think, as well, there’s something to be said for trusting everyone to get on with their job. I know performers sometimes want to know what their agent’s been submitting them for. If someone is concerned about what their agent is doing, is there no trust in that relationship?
Kelly Andrews: Trust is a really important part of the relationship between the artist and the agent. But we all know that trust has to be earned, and so blind trust is not helpful or useful really for anybody. That said, I’ve always felt, and I feel other agents would say the same, that actually, to give trust unreservedly at the very beginning of the relationship between the actor and the agent is quite important. Give it first and then withdraw it if there is proof that it needs to be withdrawn.
Because the artist is putting a great deal of faith in that moment when they choose that agent. They are putting a lot of faith in that agent – that the agent will know the right people, will be able to make the right connections, can negotiate the deals they want, all of that stuff. And for the agent’s part, they have the same kind of concerns. This actor wants this, can I achieve that for them and are we the right fit? Will working with them be okay? And also, for agents, there’s one additional thing: what’s the next thing I’m going to do for that person? They’ve come to me, what’s the first email I’m going to send or the first call I’m going to [make]? What’s the next first thing that I do for them?
So, we need there to be that trust. Agents are not just bookers. We are not just clicking the mouse and doing suggestions. I keep saying we – this is because I was an agent for so long and my new business is only four years old and in my identity and in my heart, somehow I keep saying we. I mean agents – they – because I’m not one any longer.
Agents are a commission only business. So, if the artist isn’t eating, neither is the agent. The agent isn’t working on somebody else on the client list and not that artist, they’re working on everybody all the time. And they are quite self-disciplined. They do a lot of boring prep work, really quite a lot of boring prep work. What is boring varies agent by agent, but here’s an example from my agenting life:
I really dislike comedy. I really dislike it, pretty much all comedy, scripted comedy, unscripted comedy, stand-up, slapstick – I hate it all. Now, that gives a really big gap in my knowledge base of what’s current in comedy, what’s happening in comedy, what’s been written. If I don’t volunteer as a consumer to watch comedy, which I do not, then there’s a whole bunch of stuff going on in the industry that I’m not aware of. And so, I have to backfill that. I have to know my deficiency and fill it. So, for the course of my agenting career, I would be watching an awful lot of stuff I didn’t want to watch in order that I could be current about a rising comedic talent, a rising comedic writer and all of those things that I’m not interested in.
So, while it’s very easy for me to speak about what’s happening in television and film on the drama side or what’s happening in the theatre – which theatre directors I prefer, that’s really easy for me and always was. Comedy is difficult. So, watch, watch, watch and make notes about what you’re watching and try to see what’s happening, because resting ignorance is not helpful. You need to be proactive. So, yeah, I found it quite difficult in that regard because comedy really isn’t funny. So, really sitting there all that time doing it was quite hard work.
But an agent wants their actor to trust them, so that if an agent says, “Please do this job,” or, more importantly, “Please do not do this job,” the artist knows that’s coming from a place of research, a place of consideration. We are not just going, “Oh, they’re difficult to deal with, please don’t do this job.” It’s never that. We have a specific reason. Sometimes we can’t even say what that reason is. Another client might have had a bad experience with that producer. There’s confidentiality issues, you can’t say that, but there’s a bit of you going, “We’re going down a rabbit hole here. Please don’t do this job.”
The agent needs that trust, and that’s where the trust component is. Please trust that the agent is doing the thing you’re asking them to do. Being knowledgeable about who’s a rising director and who’s a falling one. We are trying to look after you. Please let us. I think that’s something in the trust that sometimes gets lost.
Sometimes a performer needs to leave their agent because the relationship isn’t working out. Do you have any advice on warning signs that performers could look out for, or ways that they can do that gently?
Kelly Andrews: I think three things in the relationship are really important: communication, availability information and trust – we’ve talked about trust. Communication flows in both directions. If the artist calls the agent and the agent can’t speak to them right then, try not to be offended. Try to leave a message that conveys whether this is actually urgent, we actually have a crisis or it’s time critical, or it really isn’t, because the agent isn’t ducking you, the agent is just trying to balance their day. If it’s urgent, they’ll call you right back. If it’s not urgent, perhaps it can be kicked to tomorrow. That kind of openness in the communication is needed, and that’s a two-way street.
Being transparent about your availability as an artist is really important and it’s a bafflingly underused skill by artists. They just are not clear about it. They just don’t be transparent about what their availability actually is. Agents operate on the assumption that the artist is always ready, always wishful to be working. So, failure to communicate accurate availability issues is far more detrimental than it looks on the surface, because it’s just about, “Oh, I can’t do that day.” But in this industry we’re now in – not the one I started in 30 years ago – they’re not doing meetings on another day, they’re not doing it then. The producer and the director and the people, they’re all on recces on other days – this is the day. So, if you can’t do it, let’s all know that you can’t do it, and let’s not mess everybody around and have five phone calls when one would’ve done because I’d have known.
Availability information has so much more import in the day. So, any artist can really make their agent deliriously happy by simply just being clear about periods of genuine non-availability, and making discerning judgments about what is non-availability and what isn’t. So, surgery cannot be moved. Routine dental hygiene can be moved. Your agent really wants to know, and is desperately concerned about the former, and doesn’t absolutely care at all about the latter. So, if you’ve got dental hygiene, don’t tell me, because you’ll move it. If I come to you with a job, surely you’ll move it, won’t you? So, that availability thing, it is a permanent issue in that relationship.
The difficulties, I think, with that relationship are intangible. They’re far more personality-oriented and almost spiritual or psychological – a breakdown in the relationship. Because that’s what it is. Agents are working hard, we are working for you. Just because you didn’t hear from us doesn’t mean we’re not suggesting you. Just because we’re not talking to you, we might be talking to somebody else about you. So, an agent is working.
I think it will become clear that the relationship is not working because the agent really, then, is ducking you. So, rather than you calling saying it’s not urgent, could they call me before the end of the week, the artist then waits a long time for that call. That might indicate there’s something going on, and that works both ways. If the two people don’t actually want to talk to each other anymore, then it’s time to move on. But it isn’t time to move on because you were in the green room chatting to another actor in the interval of a play you’re doing and that actor said, “You should be with my agent.” Well, do you need to be? Because we’re all in the same green room on the same job.
It is quite a difficult evaluation to make, if it’s time to move on. Some agents might give signals, some agents might say, “I’m struggling to find you the kind of work you’re looking for.” And then that should be the beginning of an honest conversation. “Okay, am I right to be looking for that kind of work? Am I wrong to be looking for that kind of work? Should I be doing that?” And then maybe it will naturally resolve itself.
But truly, in my experience, I see a lot of actors move on, and then six months later wish they’d not. So, I would urge people to be very sure they’re clear about why and it’s almost always and only a breakdown in the relationship, especially if you’re not really aware of what’s happening in the sector, because you might think it’s quiet for you and the agent is going, “It’s quiet for everybody. It’s not just you.” So, the breakdown of the communication indicates that the information is not flowing in both directions. Maybe that’s the moment, then.
Natasha Raymond: I think that’s excellent advice as well – not to let other actors in the industry influence you. Wait for the problems to make themselves apparent. Don’t let people tell you these are problems.
Kelly Andrews: Obviously, any actor who is saying, “Come to my agent,” in and of itself in a capsule, that’s a fantastic thing, because that actor is excited and engaged about their agent. They’re proud of what their agent’s doing for them. They feel the team thing is really working. That’s a great thing. But the actor hearing that needs to evaluate whether they’re in a team of their own with their own agent, because if you are in the same green room, then do the agents not have similar connections? We’re all in the same job, we’re all at the same press night. So, I think it is about being sure.
And sometimes you do need to go. I’m not advocating entirely for agents in a blind way. Sometimes it is time, and sometimes an agent will be struggling because the actor has had a difficult year. They might feel now is not the time to say, “I’m no longer the right voice for you. I can’t find the work you’re looking for.” They might not want to say that because the actor has had a bad year, but there will be an energy change, and I think everything else is noise. That’s the moment. Is the relationship disintegrating? In which case, it’s time to go.
Natasha Raymond: Would an agent always be quite upfront about that? They wouldn’t avoid having that conversation.
Kelly Andrews: I think they would. I think the industry is very hard at the moment. Remember everything I’ve said about safeguarding superheroes? We’re also safeguarding the actor’s creativity, the actor’s energy. Actors do a thing that I could never do. They put themselves at risk of hearing the words ‘no’ day after day after day. I’m going to go to this audition – which isn’t an audition, it’s a meeting – they’re going to go to a meeting, and they’re going to put all their creativity out there, and then someone’s going to say, “No,” and then they’re going to shake it off and get up tomorrow and do it all again.
That’s a very peculiar ability. It’s a really odd skill. I can spot a real actor, and they’re not really sure they want to be an actor, basically by looking for that bit of DNA. You can be talking to two people in a room and go, “Yeah, you are an actor. You are not actually because you actually haven’t got that thing. That DNA thing about, ‘I will keep going, I will put myself out there’.” You have to respect that as an agent because you’re not doing it. You might be cold-calling on their behalf, but you’re not actually physically going in the room. They’re not saying ‘no’ to me, they’re saying ‘no’ to the artist. So, in that way, I think it’s really important for agents, and they do it a lot, to safeguard that creativity. They protect it a bit.
There’s a bit of it where we might not make that call and say, “It’s time for you to go,” because if the actor has had a bad year, and had a bunch of ‘no’s, do they need a no from their agent as well right now? An agent might not do it, and that’s why we’re not doing it – because on the off chance that an interview comes in in five minutes, does the act need all that going on in their head?
So, it can be difficult to discern. I think it’s fair to say that an actor might not hear that from their agent. I think it’s fair. It might be a little bit more trying to discern it. It’s not a great answer, is it? The listeners are going, “I want Kelly to tell me exactly when it’s time for me to leave my agent.” And I didn’t, did I? I basically said stay where you are.
Natasha Raymond: You gave them good things to think about and good things to look out for. I think the personality difference, like you say, I hadn’t thought of that actually, but you’re right, it is a working relationship.
Kelly Andrews: The truth is if you’re going to deal with an artist regularly, [so] there is an element of you do like them. Most agents, I think, will say, “Do I want to work with this person for 15 years?” is in the back of their head in that first meeting, because they’re going to be stuck with each other potentially. And so, you want to feel that on that journey you’re going to grow as people, that the relationship is going to grow. So, an agent is making that evaluation the same way an actor is, and we want that to be great. So, in the end, you do kind of like your clients.
I was very lucky. Right up until I decided to stop agenting, I felt that no matter what I saw when I went to the theatre – how dreadful the play might be, how disappointed I might be in the director or the script or whatever I was seeing – what was not ever going to disappoint me, very rarely, was my actual client. Because I had chosen their talent, I had continued to choose that talent by staying with them, by endorsing them, by continuing to suggest them and represent them for many years. So, I would go there thinking, “Well, I don’t need to worry about my client tonight. Everybody else might look rubbish, but my client will be great.”
Now, that might be a bit of self-delusion. That might be a bit of the actor’s strength that the actor exhibits in the audition. That might be the agent’s strength, where the agent just goes, “My clients are going to be fine.” But that’s what the actor wants. The actor wants to feel that’s still happening, and that’s the moment when maybe there’s clues.
As a former agent, is there anything that an agent would want performers to know but they couldn’t necessarily tell them themselves?
Kelly Andrews: There’s like a Sicilian thing – a blood oath I’ve signed of things I probably shouldn’t say. This is hard, but be realistic about the profession you’re in and the position you hold currently in it. That’s not to trample on people’s dreams. An actor is holding their dreams of a career here in their hands and it’s the agent’s job never to diminish that, and I wouldn’t want anybody to think that agents are diminishing that. But an evaluation of where you are in your career at all times is healthy.
Do your reading. I have an agent friend who said to me years ago that an actor had called to talk about what was happening in their career – it had been a bit quiet. And he hadn’t said it, but he had wanted to say, “But have you read Broadcast this week?” I know that all actors, and writers too, come to our community from a place of creativity, initially. But you’re joining a business. It’s called show ‘business’, not anything else. And therefore, in this era, with all of the advances in technology and all of the advances that we’ve seen in my 30 years as an agent, I believe that artists need to understand a little bit more about the business than the creativity of the business. The creativity they have, they do it, they know what they’re doing with the script. I would never presume to say, but I would presume to say be aware about what’s happening in our sector.
Do your reading. Read The Stage, read Broadcast. If you can afford it, take it. It’s very much production led. It very much is talking about film finance, TV finance – the business bit in the UK. But if you don’t know for yourself when somebody says to you, “Commissioning is really down in 2025, which is why nothing’s happening,” – if someone says that to you, your own reading will tell you that that’s true or not true. And then you know a decision about the person who’s telling you that.
I think we would want to say, be realistic. Look at the shape of the industry. Look at where you are. If you are a leading artist, then you’re not looking so hard at the state of the industry because you are already booked through to ’28. If you’re in your career somewhere, not in the leading roles, have a look at what’s happening around you because other forces are at play. It’s not just that they don’t want you.
I think that’s the thing. I think just a little wider awareness, not trapped entirely in the text, not trapped entirely in the script or entirely in the creativity. Just raise your eyes a little wider at what’s happening in the sector, because there’s lots of things happening in the sector. I made a joke about the tariffs five minutes ago, and we’re all sitting here hyperventilating and breathing to wait to see what that looks like. If that happens, what will that be? What will we do? Who’s doing what to help fight that? Just vague awareness. These are real things. These are real things that will contribute to a downsizing of our production level. And if they’re not making it, the actor can’t be in it.
And also, being aware of all the things in the world, all the diversity, inclusivity, all of the challenges that our sector is actually leading the charge on. There are lots of other industries and professions that are way behind even thinking about this kind of stuff. We are dealing with it head on, doing our best. There’s still work to do, but we are moving forward. That’s something actors need to take on as well, because sometimes you are just not right for the role because you are not culturally correct. You don’t have the lived life skills. There’s something happening in the project that makes you ineligible this time.
That doesn’t mean the industry’s over for you. It just means things are changing. Be aware of what they are so that every rejection is not so personal. That’s the other thing – actually, today, they wanted somebody with blue eyes and you’ve got brown eyes. They were family matching. But more often than not now, those decisions about why you didn’t get a job are bigger. And so, it’s good to be informed about what those things are.
Natasha Raymond: I’m sure all the agents will thank you for saying that at long last to the clients.
Kelly Andrews: They’ll also thank me for the notes I left at home that I didn’t bring today, all the things of the blood oath that I didn’t say.
Could you tell us a bit about what you’re doing now?
Kelly Andrews: Just before all the Covid stuff, it made a life change. I stopped being an agent, and I rather thought maybe it was sort of over – the industry. I sort of thought maybe that’s it. And being an agent is a very London-centric sort of tied life. So, I moved out of London to be nearer family. A week before we physically put our bits in the moving van, the Covid pandemic lockdown began. So, I moved in the second week of the lockdown out of London. So, it was a great place to be locked down, because it was fields and country and what a lovely place in that hot weather to be allowed to go for your one hour walk a day.
But it meant that my opportunities for seeking employment were suddenly very different because I thought, “Oh, I’ll go there and there’s lots of [jobs].” For a while, I thought, partially because of why I stopped being an agent, “I’ll just get a job, any job. Mental health break, get a job, that’ll be fine.” And, of course, I didn’t. My mental health break was everybody else’s Covid.
Lots of people called me about force majeure clauses in the theatre, contracts that were being collapsed because of Covid. “Can they do this? Kelly, you are really good. You used to be chair of the PMA. You’re really good at reading this minutiae. Can they do this? Can they do it this way? Do we have to let them not pay the artist for this?” And a lot of people kept calling. And then one of my friends actually went, “Oh, you haven’t got anybody on this job, have you?” And I went, “No. I’m not an agent anymore, no.” And they said, “Oh, I think I should probably be paying you for this. This is like a consult.” “Oh, it’s a consult?” And here we are.
So, four years after that or three years after that, my title is consultant. I’m a business affairs and talent agency consultant. I work with agents and casting directors on two things. I have a coaching and training side where I help young agents and young casting people learn about the agreements that operate the contractual component of booking an artist. I do that. For some very junior agents, I do basic driving the desk skills. I have all sorts of agent-related sort of stuff over there.
And then the other part of my job is truly consulting, which is agents who don’t have the time in the day to do the 40 pages of the contract that’s come from one of these big employment companies for their artists. They just don’t have the time. 40 pages of contractual nonsense that they have to go back and forth and challenge and do all of that. I do that for them. They will outsource that bit to me in conjunction with them, because I don’t know the artist, I don’t know the deal. Obviously, they’ve done all of that.
So, I’ll do that if they’re too busy, or as has happened recently in a couple of occasions, kids agencies who are dealing with much, much bigger deals than they’ve historically ever seen, that have tie-ins for longer periods. All sorts of things like that. I’m just a resource, really, now. That’s what I do. I do consulting for the industry, for the sector about how we do it and helping everybody stay honest, not keeping them honest because they already are, but actually helping them. It’s a lot of work for agents and I can do some of it for them.
Natasha Raymond: It’s good to know that even if you’ve taken a step back from being an agent, they can still access your knowledge and all those years of experience.
Kelly Andrews: And it’s really good for me because at the point I decided to not agent anymore, I really felt that 30 years of investment was sort of slipping through my fingers, and that I might not use that skill and that knowledge. And I’m a nerd. I love it! I’ve got books all over my shelves now about intellectual property and copyright and AI and all of that sort of stuff. All the current challenges. Much more time to read all that stuff than I had when I was an agent, and I love that. So, in a way, it’s worked out for me really well. I’m sort of doing the same job, I’m safeguarding, but one removed. I’m standing behind the agent. The agent is doing all the work, and I’m just going, “How about this? Maybe about this. Can I help with this? Do you want help with that? No. Okay, I’ll go away, fine.” It’s great. I get to use everything I’ve learned and focus on the bit that interests me most.
Natasha Raymond: I reckon you’ll have some very interesting discussions coming up with all this AI stuff coming into the industry. That’s either going to be a field day or a headache.
Kelly Andrews: I think the really clear thing is the industry doesn’t really want to say you can’t use it. All of us, I think, appreciate a great Saturday night in the cinema watching a Superman movie or a Mission Impossible movie or an Avengers movie. I think we do. And I think nobody wants to say, “Well, actually, if you need to make Tom Cruise fly and he’s really not doing this one thing himself, use a bit of AI, that’s fine.” I don’t think anybody thinks that that’s ridiculous. I think we want production to be able to make the best production, but I think we need to be clear that we’re only using those tools in a way to enhance this project. Not to let that acquired artistic input get spread like butter across a load of other things and for the AI to learn how to do something better that, ultimately, will lead to the absence of a job for somebody in the industry.
Natasha Raymond: That could be a whole separate podcast in itself.
Kelly Andrews: Or a whole separate day of meetings here at Spotlight, when the whole industry comes together to debate the problem.
Finally, what have you recently seen that you’ve enjoyed and would recommend to other people?
Kelly Andrews: This was the one I was hoping we’d talk so much we’d never get to, because I don’t really have a very good answer. I’m incredibly – which you might have guessed by now – actor driven. I’m the daughter of an actress, and I was actor driven as an agent and I still am as a consumer, which means that I just like good actors, brilliant actors doing their thing, wherever that is. And sometimes, it’s in really weird places. You’ll turn something on and think, “Oh, this is load of old rubbish. Oh my God, what’s he doing? Look at that performance.” I’m really like that. And that’s what I look for. The script might be dreadful, the plot might be entirely unbelievable, but I see an unexpected sparkling moment of acting and I can go for months on that. I’m like, “Do you remember that moment when so-and-so did so-and-so?” And people are like, “I didn’t even see it.” I’m like, “Well, no. Probably because you weren’t looking in that thing.”
For an example, obviously everybody’s been talking about Timothée Chalamet’s work in A Complete Unknown, not least all me, because I’m a huge fan of his. I think he’s always quite wonderful. And then there’s Edward Norton – always quite wonderful – knocking it out of the park in the second role. But are many people talking about Scoop McNairy? Are they? Three, maybe four scenes, doesn’t speak. Literally, the character doesn’t speak. I think one line? It’s absolutely extraordinary work and he should have been nominated in every best supporting actor category we had last year. He was extraordinary.
For me, it’s that kind of thing. It’s the excellent performances. But if you really, really want an answer, I’m going to go with the Netflix Oscar winner, Emilia Pérez. It’s not that recent, but it’s a very controversial project. It was very difficult – a blend of song and music and dance, and a very serious subject, and drug cartels. There’s a whole bunch of stuff on paper. You go, “None of that works. It does not work on paper,” and it really does for me. It really did on camera. I thought those three ladies were extraordinary. And I think, stylistically, it was really difficult and I think they did it. It really worked for me. So, there you are. That’s it. That’s the one I’m going with.
Natasha Raymond: That’s a good one. I knew it wasn’t going to be a comedy, whatever you said.
Kelly Andrews: Absolutely nothing funny! Now I’m not an agent, I don’t watch it. Which people who know who my mum is think is hilarious, because a large part of her career has been in comedy and situation comedy on television. And I just sit there going, “I don’t know any of this. I don’t laugh at anything.” Terrible.
Thanks, Kelly, for taking the time to talk to us on the Spotlight Podcast!
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