”The least sexy secret to success’’: An Interview with Actress Claire Hilton

It is me and Claire, my friend, the actress. We are on the couch, facing one another with our legs crossed atop each other on one of those humid August nights before August implodes into September. Claire and I met not too long ago, in March, on the set of a film. I was on set to linger because my boyfriend, Harrison, was producing the film. Claire was there because she was the lead.

Claire exudes warmth when she talks; you want to lean in and capture her words and energy. On set, she had befriended a woman named Linda - the mother-in-law of the director’s sister - who was acting alongside her. Even now, Claire and Linda still talk, meet for dinner or a show. I think this is an important detail to include because it says a lot about Claire’s character.

On this night, we talk. Slowly at first, and then, as it always goes with good friends, joyously and urgently.

I ask Claire, “I wonder, if someone were to ask you, why do you keep creating in a world where it’s so hard and expensive to be creator – why is it, do you know?” And then to elaborate further, I add, “Is there a drive or –?”

And then, Claire announces “Oh, here he is! The cat has emerged! This is Boris,” and I say hello to Boris, the gray cat with the white stomach and the bright powder-blue collar.

Claire replies, “I mean sometimes it just kind of feels like compulsion, but I think the compulsion comes from knowing how I feel when I am creating and knowing how I feel when I'm not. And how I feel when I'm not is bad. You know. That’s why I go home and act out little plays in my room because I know it will make me feel better. It feeds my soul in a way that nothing else could. It’s very worth it to me to, like, chase that feeling.”

“Have you always loved acting?” I ask Claire, “did you know this was what you always wanted to do?”

“Well,” Claire says, “my mom has a very funny story that I don’t remember, but when I was three or four, she took me to see Annie, and when we left, I was sobbing and saying ‘I wanna go up there, I wanna go up there.’

I was a prolific and compulsive liar in elementary school. I would tell my classmates all these crazy stories about my achievements or that I could talk to dolphins, just insane, insane stuff. I would lie so often that it got to the point where my teachers would call my parents and inform them that I was disrupting class.

My mom was very worried about my lying. She talked to my grandfather who was an educator and was like ‘I don’t know what to do with Claire,’ and my grandpa replied, ‘I think she just has a really big imagination, tell her to do something creative like tell stories and to write her stories down.’ My mom decided to put me in an acting class after that conversation.

So, I started acting classes when I was in second grade at the YMCA. That was when I realized ‘this is what I am.’

I tell Claire that I understand and that having someone indulge my creative impulses as a child was very affirming to the younger me who was trying to find ground in the world.

Claire tells me that she had a lot of professional experiences as a child. She worked professionally in regional theatre starting in second grade and throughout high school. She performed at the Tribeca Film Festival and made it to the final round of auditions for a lead role in a Coen Brothers movie.

“I don’t think I knew enough to be anxious about who I was meeting or performing for, so the whole experience just seemed like a natural product of the job at hand, which I think has informed much of how I seek work now, that being anxious about my performance is one thing, but all the external factors are simply products of how the process has to work.”

I also want to know what it felt like to have an external person, a person whose entire job is to find talent, validating her acting.

“I’m really lucky in that my parents took my love of acting very seriously,” Claire tells me. “When I told them I wanted to audition for a Broadway show, they would say ‘ok, let’s do that.’ This support and my experiences around professional actors gave me a sense of professionalism at a really young age that I am really grateful for.

I was able to see this life that was possible–I saw so clearly that acting was something I could do with my life and career, which is maybe a blessing and a curse. I was twelve, and I was thinking ‘oh I am a working actor, this is what I’m going to do with my life.’

And then as I started thinking about college, it felt like such a big part of my life was coming to end, the sort of carefree attitude that surrounded the time I had for auditions seemed immediately precarious, and I had to start thinking seriously about a future. Acting is something I’d done forever, but moving towards adulthood brought into perspective how scary it might be to actually pursue this as a career.

My senior year of high school,” Claire continues, “is when I really got into languages. I was taking French, and I thought ‘I can be smart, too.’ I really liked school throughout high school. I reached this point where I still really loved acting, but I didn’t know where I was going because of all the uncertainty that comes with being an actor. It’s something you have to reckon with sooner or later. I also grew up in a very traditional East Coast town where all the kids from my high school went to Ivy’s. The way I grew up, I thought I had to be high achieving academically and monetarily. Artists weren’t the most valued people in my experience growing up there.

When I was a senior, I had a plan. I would apply to two acting schools, and if I got into one, I would go. I applied to regular schools, too, for English. It was a way of copping out of my dream. I wasn’t expecting acting school to work out, and then I made it all the way to a final callback at Julliard.”

It is raining outside. The cat is playing with a feather on a stick. I know what happens next.

“I didn’t get in. I was crushed because my effort to protect my heart didn’t work. It all ended in my worst case scenario. You get a taste of the dream, you think it’s a sign, and then it collapses as if saying ‘you’re not meant to be an actor.’ Like, ‘bye, bye no more for you.’

I went to Fordham. I decided to study English and French and become a translator. I didn’t really know what to do, and in some ways it was freeing. For the first time, my identity wasn’t ‘Claire the actor, Claire the theater kid,’ I was just a normal person. It was really nice to go to college and not be a weird, undesirable theater geek anymore. Suddenly I was a pretty eighteen-year-old, and it was so exciting for me. Men thought I was desirable, and I went full force into it because it was something I hadn’t really experienced before.

I went home for the summer my senior year, and this local theater group was doing Romeo and Juliet. My mom told me to audition, so I went, and I ended up getting cast. I worked on the play all summer and had an ‘oh-fuck’ moment because I remembered that I really loved acting. I realized it was going to be in my life in some way or the other. I had tried to put this dream to bed, and it just hadn’t worked out.”

“Would you be content doing community theater for the rest of your life?” I want to know.

“I have always thought,” Claire replies, “that if I am not an actor professionally, I will get a job teaching, acting and do community theater, you know, that was never unappealing to me.”

I tell Claire that that is refreshing to hear. In my mind, so much of growing up is acknowledging the difficulties of life on one hand and the restlessness to create on the other; learning how to survive and satisfy that creative urge.

“I met actors that worked at these amazing regional theaters,” Claire continues, “like the Guthrie or Westport Country Playhouse or the Geffen–these working actors with amazing careers and maybe a side job or two, and I have always thought that that was an exciting option.”

Claire works as a home nurse to pay her bills. I want to know how she got into home nursing and how she balances that with acting.

“I grew up with a sibling who has disabilities so, my whole life, I was very exposed to the medical world and caring for someone with medical needs. I got my home-nursing certification in high school in part to help my mom take care of my sister.

In college, I worked at a restaurant, I was babysitting, I was teaching French to three year olds, dog walking, random stuff. Then, I met this lovely family who has a son with muscular dystrophy and a lot of similar health needs to my sister. I sort of became his caretaker because I knew how to do a lot of the stuff he needed.

It’s something that pays well and is flexible. I make my own hours and can audition. It is very fulfilling and is something I enjoy more than working in a restaurant. The family referred me to some other people who could use my services. I like it as far as day jobs go, being a caretaker is something I really enjoy. I like being around people and talking to them; just getting to know so many different kinds of people I would never ordinarily get the chance to know.. It gives me enough money to live in a nice apartment in Brooklyn with roommates and audition. I can also pay for my own headshots, acting classes, the occasional vacation… I do feel very grateful for that.

I make about $50,000 - $56,000 a year doing home-aide work, and I supplement it with teaching yoga a couple times a week at a center for adults with special needs. Acting gigs, too, also supplement my income.”

Claire tells me that, finally, after a period of cold-emailing agents and trying to get recognized, she has gotten several meetings. I ask her if she can tell me about that process and how she has gotten her foot in the door.

“Confidence,” Claire tells me, “I finally feel confident in myself. I used to beg agents to take me without thinking about what I have to offer as an artist and a person.

I have a sense now of who I am and the types of people I want to work with. I really made it a point this past year and a half to build relationships with whoever I could get in front of and making sure I got in front of as many people as possible and befriend as many people as possible in a genuine way.

Having these meetings is an exciting next step in my career. The way acting works is that you can’t, as a regular person, audition for, say, the next Safdie Brothers movie. You have to have an agent who knows you as an artist and who will then pitch you to these directors or producers or whoever.

So, hopefully, meeting these agents is an opportunity to really get my foot in the door. I mean, I feel like I’ve already been getting my foot in the door on my own which I am very proud of. But to have somebody in your corner who has even more connections than you do and can send an email to, like, Steven Spielberg for you, it’s a huge leg up. I mean, having an agent isn’t everything, but the legitimacy they can give you in these spaces is so huge and opens doors.”

I ask Claire, “Do you ever have the fear that it won’t work out?”

Claire says, “I definitely let myself feel that fear. I sometimes feel like it’s a little bit self indulgent in a way. But I also think I’m so ‘blinders-on’ to achieve this thing. Maybe that’s part of being young, idealistic.

It’s hard, it’s hard and piles up and gets you overwhelmed sometimes. But I never think I go as far as thinking I am going to quit.”

“For me,” I say, “the drive to keep going, it’s partially out of love, but also out of self preservation or blind belief in myself. It’s like I’m underwater, and there’s this rope, and I know if I keep pulling, then I trust it will take me to the surface. And the surface, I guess, is making it somehow as a writer. I keep following the rope because I don’t know what else to do.”

“Yeah,” Claire says. “And it's sort of that thing of where I'm like, I'm already this far down this path. I've committed almost my entire life to doing this. If I stop now, that would be a shame. I have to see what happens.”

“Anyways,” Claire continues, “it’s really funny the people you’ll meet in the city. They come back to you in weird ways.

The first play I was in after I graduated from college, after I realized I had to take acting seriously again, I got it because I made a Backstage account and was just submitting for everything. I was cast in this short play at this place called the Players Theater in the West Village. It was an experimental art piece about two people who fall in love in the Twin Towers on 9/11.”

I gape. “Oh, yeah,” Claire says and laughs. “Oh my god,” I say, “were you paid for this?”

“Not a dime! It was volunteer work, but the guy who directed it was this lovely guy named Peter. We did this play, we were like, this is weird but we’re doing it, that’s fine. Then, last summer, we both independently worked with this fabulous theater organized here in the city called ‘The 24 Hour Plays.’

“Peter works with them pretty extensively, and I ran into him at a production they were doing at Classic Stage. Peter was like ‘oh my gosh you were in the first play I directed’ and I was like ‘oh my gosh that was my first play out of college.’ And now, here we are working with a very great theater company. He is doing amazing things, and now I have this person in my life who knew me when we were both complete newbies and had no idea what we were doing. And look how we have grown, and we’re still both in each other’s circle. I do think that the people who stay in it really stay in it. You just re-meet people.

“Another example is this indie I am shooting at the end of August. I am so excited about it, and the way I got the part was that I auditioned for this director five years ago for a project I didn’t even get a callback for. And he remembered me. He remembered this one very specific clip of myself I have on my reel, and he had me in mind for this particular project for several years. I never knew about it.

He contacted me about it only recently. I think putting yourself out there makes a difference. You can’t really imagine things happening until they do right in front of your face, you know?”

I tell Claire that I feel like so much of success, the least sexy secret to success, at least, is just sticking around for a while. It seems that the longer you do something, the more likely you are to naturally rise in some capacity.

I think about my friends’ parents growing up who are successful in creative spaces and have managed to make a living, and they have done so by simply sticking with it mixed with luck, which always favors the prepared. It’s a hard and long game. If you’re talented and working for work, and you know where to latch onto those little glimmers of luck and really hang on to them - which is up to you, then things might just work out.

“Bryan Cranston has this interview quote,” Claire adds, “something like, ‘if you’re saying you’re gonna move to the city and try acting for two years, you better do something else.’

“It’s just not how it works at all. I mean, it does for some people. They get really lucky. Some people are beautiful and get an agent and a Marvel movie, and it’s over.

“But I don’t really see myself stopping because of what we were talking about in the beginning of this conversation. I know how I feel when I’m not doing it, so I always think I will find a way to do it whatever form it takes. It’s exciting because I feel like that form is still taking shape– I’m looking forward to seeing what it becomes.

“I'm really excited too. I think that's part of the beauty of coming to New York. I think it's such a cliche and it's not romantic. It's kind of a grind. It's really hard and really exhausting. But I think the beauty is you have the chance to grow up with people and watch them evolve as artists. So it's like the good, the bad, and the ugly.”

“I think that’s why I am so excited about this project,” I tell Claire. “Because I am in the same place, and I see so many of my talented friends creating. I wonder what would happen if we preserved the moments of figuring it out. Maybe someone might see them and realize that creating is not easy and it’s worth doing because creating is so important.”

“Anyways, those are all of my questions.”

I stop the recorder.

“That was so fun, that was great!” Claire says.

Claire is a New England born, Brooklyn-based actress. Credits: New York Theatre- 24 Hour Plays, A.R.T, Moxie Incubator. Regional- Westport Country Playhouse, Shakespeare on the Sound. Film/TV; The Deuce (HBO), and upcoming projects Lasciare (The Russo Bros), and The Temptation of Loneliness. Claire is an alumna of LAMDA and the William Esper Studio. She also has a degree in English and French Literature from Fordham University.