Or at least having been a working actor. The irony is that if he was a highly successful actor who didn’t need side jobs, they’d be attacking him for being an “out-of-touch Hollywood elitist.”
People have really weird ideas of how the arts work and what the careers of artists are like. The assumption generally seems to be that there’s an early period of struggle, and then people either do something else or have “success” that leads to a life of riches. A friend has published a few novels (from which he’s made next-to-nothing), and when his girlfriend, an English teacher, had him come to her class to talk about the novel-writing process, the students all assumed he must be wealthy. As high school students, I figured that they would have known better by then, but apparently this is a view adults hold as well.
