My ex-boyfriend is an actor, and when he's not starring in cool movies with famous people, or looking like a jaunty ginger man-child, he gets to play sick for eight hours a day and still make way more money than most of his friends do at their shitty, minimum wage jobs. Here's how being a medical actor works: you get a script with the profile of a patient, a background of the disease, and a list of symptoms, and you act it out as med students try to deal with you, whether it's getting you to admit to something that caused your condition (doing drugs, having unprotected sex, sticking a broomstick up your ass) or just practicing communication with someone who is totally bonkers. It's basically a test of bedside manner and protocol. Sometimes he ends up doing the same scenario 50 times in a day and by the end of it his brain gets all melty and he starts saying shit that makes no sense.See this goofy ginger do re-enactments of various illnesses on viceland.
Advertisement