Jeremy Strong's manager said he seemed too desperate in auditions

If there’s one thing we all know about Jeremy Strong at this point, it’s that he’s really freakin’ intense. That intensity has apparently been with him from the beginning of his career, starting in the audition room. “I had a manager once who told me, ‘You know, you seem desperate. That’s why you’re not getting it: You seem desperate,'” he recalled of early auditions for the Los Angeles Times Actors Roundtable. “And I said, ‘I am desperate.’ This is like we’re fighting for our lives trying to do this thing.”

Strong went on to say he’d recently done an event called “Fearless Performances,” “but I woke up this morning thinking it’s such a misnomer because there’s so much fear involved, at least for me.” One of the things he loves about acting is “to do something that you don’t know that you can do.” Strong is currently in production playing music manager and producer Jon Landau in the biopic of Bruce Springsteen, “and he said something in his autobiography, that ‘the experience that you have, the exhilaration of it and the depth of it is directly proportional to the void that you’re dancing over,'” the actor quoted. “And so I find that that equation works.”

These days, Strong is one of the most acclaimed and respected actors of his generation, so he’s probably not doing very many auditions anymore. But even if he is “offer only” now, his self-perception hasn’t necessarily changed from the desperation of the audition room and how “miraculous” it felt when getting the chance to actually work. “There’s a thing called ‘arrival fallacy,’ which is that the horizon is just always receding. You don’t arrive. I mean, I’ve never felt like I’ve arrived,” he said at the roundtable. “It’s just a search, and you’re on the frontier of uncertainty and doubt, and taking risks.”