Welcome back to It Pays the Bills! Today’s guest is George Hider, who’s day job and creative pursuits merge brilliantly in his work at the London Dungeon. We chatted about staying creative, George’s cheesemongering experiences, and more.
A bit about George:
George never set out to become a “Scream Queen” - it just sort of happened. As a multi-hyphenate actor-writer-comedian-content creator, he is no stranger to finding different ways to express his creativity. He has worked on a variety of projects that all seem to have at least some horror-ific undertones to them, including HBO’s Avenue 5, Discovery’s Evil Live Here, and the worst-reviewed film of 2022, Jeepers Creepers: Reborn. In between these projects he has found a nice little niche working as a performer across various London attractions, including the London Dungeon and the Crystal Maze Live Experience. Beyond that he loves football (proper football), cheese, and long walks on the beach at sunset. Follow him on instagram @georgehideractor.
Instagram | The View From Here Instagram | The View From Here TikTok
In the condensed transcript below, I’ve italicized my questions and comments. Paid subscribers will receive a bonus edition next week, Perks of the Job. Enjoy!
What is your creative pursuit?
I'm working at the London Dungeon five days a week. It's a six-month contract, which is ending in like three weeks, which is terrifying. But we're, you know, we're moving. I'm with a great company with Merlin Entertainment. They're so fun to work with and work for. A business is a business. There's always going to be some ups and downs with it.
So yeah, my contract ends with them in like three weeks. I was hoping that by the time we got here that a permanent position had opened up there. I know there are some that are coming soon. It's taking longer than expected. So we're going to see what the next steps are for that.
And then outside of that, I host pub quizzes. Which, again, super fun. I get to go to a bunch of really interesting pubs every week and entertain people in its own unique way. It's kind of like stand-up practice almost, you're in front of a room of people with a microphone, just talking, kind of harnessing that skill.
It's what I think people should be doing in our industry is working these performative, quote-unquote, day jobs. It took me a long time to get there as well. But really, I've reached a point where I now think that the only thing I should be doing in my life is working in performance in some way. I mean, I have a master's degree in it.
So that's kind of the pursuit of the moment, figuring out how to do that full time and getting creative with that.
So you're primarily an actor, but I know you've also written some stuff. You used to write sketch comedy.
Yeah, sketch comedy stuff. I worked with News Revue and I launched my own thing a couple of years ago called The View From Here, which has gone on a bit of hiatus, but hopefully we'll be coming back in 2025.
How did creative life start for you?
So I had my first taste of acting in an acting class in my local town in suburban New York. I think funnily enough, I had seen Harry Potter and I'd seen all the kids acting in that and was like, oh, that would be so cool if I could be one of those kids. And my parents went, all right, do an acting class, see if you like it. And then shortly after that, got into the school plays in my local middle school. My first lead role was Nathan Detroit in Guys and Dolls, when I was 12 years old.
And then from there, I was playing a lot of as we would call it in the States, soccer, but football at the time. And I reached a point where I had to decide, am I going to do acting or am I going to do soccer? And I had just come back from the school's trip to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival into preseason for the varsity team and hated it. I'm just like, okay, I know what I want to do now. I want to be an actor. And started pursuing it much more heavily from there.
And so I started looking at colleges to do that. Went to Skidmore College. I got a Bachelor's of Science in theater. So I can now say I have a BS degree in theater and philosophy, which if that's not the most BS degree to exist, I don't know what is.
And so let's talk about your current day job as well, because you're one of the rare people I know where it's linked in the sense that your day job is an acting job.
For sure. I kind of found the dungeon completely by accident. Post-COVID, while I was working as a bar back at Tina, I'd just come off of leaving that job to go do a quick little shoot on a TV series. And then was kind of stuck without anything to do, waiting for paychecks to come in.
Can we pause there? Because that TV series was kind of big, wasn't it?
It's the coolest thing I've ever done in my career, for sure. So I was working, as I said, as the cover bar supervisor at the Tina Turner musical at the time. And I had gotten into work and we were about to start our shift. And my phone went and it was my agent. I was like, okay, an audition's come in. Cool. Pick up the phone. She goes, we've been talking about that Avenue 5.
The show was Avenue 5, it's worth saying, which was on HBO. Armando Iannucci directed and produced it. Hugh Laurie, Josh Gad were the leads. Very cool thing to even be referenced to.
And so I was like, oh, cool. So when's my audition? She went, oh, no, you're not auditioning. You got the job. I'm just like, what? I haven't auditioned. I haven't sent them anything. How do they even know about me?
Yeah, they watched your showreel on YouTube and were like, give him the job.
That showreel still has less than 100 views on YouTube, by the way. So what, like 2% of the views on my showreel are people who then gave me my best acting job of all time.
Filmed two episodes with them, and my character was still alive at the end of season two, so it was like, coming back, season three, and then it got cancelled.
It was such a good show. It's so much fun to work with Hugh Laurie and Josh Gad, amazing guys. Zach Woods, just the best guy I've ever worked with. Like a literal genius.
All right, that was a bit of a detour, but back to you. You've done that and then you found the dungeon.
Found the dungeon. I was looking at like different - because I kind of made this commitment to myself when I started working at Tina. Like, yes, it's a bar job, but it's at a West End theater. I'm going to meet other actors. It's good for networking, all that stuff. I really should be working in our industry somehow to at least get my foot in the door.
And funnily enough, it was my mother sent me a casting breakdown, I think either from Mandy or Backstage or something. Like, I know it's a bit tourist trappy, but you need a job. So like, keep it open as an option.
And I wrote to them and they were like, yeah, come in for an audition. And from the moment I got there, I was like, actually, this is cool. I could do this and it's acting. I can say I'm a working actor in central London, if nothing else. So I was like, yeah, let's do it.
It's so fun. It's getting to scare people. I have learned throughout my career is kind of a secret talent of mine. I'm weirdly kind of a scream queen.
So it's five days a week. Do you have shifts?
So we typically, this time of year, it's off-peak, so we're open 11 till 4, which means I'll get in on an average day probably around 10 a.m. Get in a costume, you have your daily briefs, you find out how many people are coming, all that sort of stuff. And then, yeah, you're out on the floor starting at 11, close at 4.
So how many characters do you play?
You play three a day. And then there's five different groups of characters that I can play. So you cycle through three to four different roles a day and you're playing different roles a day. Ideally, every day, sometimes they're not best about moving us around. We play a lot of the same roles a lot of the time. But it's different enough to stop you from going a bit nuts.
Have you ever had anybody have like a severe scared reaction?
Oh, every day. We have people fainting, throwing up, like panic attacks. You name it, I've seen it at the dungeon.
The witch show for me is the scariest show in the dungeon because it looks like they teleport around the room. And there's whispers from the women who have played the witch that that room is actually legitimately haunted. I haven't necessarily seen anything. I've heard some things, but I haven't really seen much ghost stuff. It's more just a vibe.
What have your previous day jobs been? And of them, do you have any favorites or least favorites?
I loved working in cheese. I got started on that because I graduated from Skidmore and moved back home. I was living out in my parents' basement at the time. Needed a job, as one does when you're no longer at college. And there was this local, like in my hometown, this mom and pop cheese shop that was hiring. And I was like, well, I like to eat cheese. Why not? And just kind of fell in love with it.
And then while I was working there, he worked a lot with Neal's Yard to import cheeses. And so when I moved back here, that just kind of felt like the natural thing to do was to go to Neal's Yard and work for them. It became very apparent that that if I wasn't going to be a full-time cheesemonger, that I was not going to have a fun time in that company. It's nice being the go-to guy anytime anyone's putting a structurally board together,
Something we haven't talked about as well, going back to your current day job, is you host a few pub quizzes.
That was born out of a need to find something to do in between contracts at the Dungeon. Because you work these six-month contracts and then you have to take six months off. There's a lot of reasons that they give, like people get burned out, they're less engaged. It just helps keep it fresh and exciting. There's definitely an element of they would then have to pay me benefits and make the position permanent. Which is fine. I get it. It's a business. But it did leave me in kind of a hole last time around.
Because I'd also said to myself, I'll take a few months to focus on my writing and take a bit of a sabbatical. And quickly learned, like, no, I need something to keep me busy. I need something to focus on. And so I was like, well, I've been thinking about pub quizzing for a while. Why don't I just look at what's around and see who's available? And the first company I went to was this company called Inquisition. And I was immediately impressed. And so I just got started with them and quickly picked up my first regular quiz.
So I do two of those a week guaranteed, and they're always asking me if I'm available to cover other ones, so I typically wind up doing three a week, which is a really great second earner. It's minimal work. It's a great second job. Highly recommend.
And I think it also goes back to what you were saying about having that performative aspect to your job.
Yes. This is something I've been thinking about a lot, and it's something that I genuinely believe, is that life is too short to do anything other than what it is you really love to do. There's loads of people that are going to be in the way of you doing what you want to do, so I think you genuinely have to do what it is that you love to do and what you were put on this earth to do.
And so you've got to get creative in what it is that you do and how you pursue the overall goal of entertaining people being involved in in our industry. It’s what I love about the Dungeon. I get to say I'm a working actor but I'm still working a nine to five and earning a paycheck and corporate’s involved and all all that sort of stuff.
As well, pub quiz hosting, I’m kind of practicing the stand-up stuff. I might get into writing stand-up in the new year. We'll see. Certainly, I feel like that muscle of just standing in front of a room of people with a microphone and being the center of attention is vital to being a stand-up and is being developed by me doing this over and over again.
I think you have to find a way to be performative in your day job if you want to be a performer for your career. It's like if you're an athlete. I don't want to say practice makes perfect because I don't think perfection is attainable, but practice makes do. You've got to be able to practice what you really want to do. And if you're taking time away that's not focused on that, you're going to fall behind.
How does your day job feed into, relate to, or oppose your creative pursuit?
For sure, the time commitment to something like The Dungeon is a lot. And they do sell it to you as like a 25-hour-a-week job, and there is loads of time outside. But if you include the travel time in and out every morning, how exhausting of a job it is. You know, you're on your feet six consecutive hours doing shows. If it's busy, you're doing a show every six minutes. So up to ten an hour you could be doing.
It takes a lot out of you physically and mentally because of some of the people that you have to deal with in this job. It is in opposition in that way.
But at the same time, it was posed to me as a gym for acting by one of the managers there when I first started. And that is so true. It is honing, A, the repeatability of your craft, but B, dealing with less than ideal conditions and finding nuance in these characters so that they don't become repetitive. Finding the different ways that you can keep that job from just being a line reciting machine.
And doing that has been absolutely vital for the other work that I do. I feel much more confident in audition rooms and much more confident if any chance I get to act. But I don't want to say properly because I'm doing that with the Dungeon. But to be in that more traditional, like I'm on a stage in front of people, with a proscenium arch in front of me and all that. I would feel so much more confident on there now because I know that I'm not going to get bored of the work. If I've done this, I can do anything. I can do eight shows on the West End every week.
Do you have any advice for anybody looking to pursue a creative career?
Goodness me, be flexible. In the sense that I've been talking about with find a performative job, but that job can take so many different shapes and forms and you can't rely on other people to give you a career. You've got to find a way to do it yourself and you've got to get creative with it in that way while still maintaining yourself as a performance artist, whatever it is that you want to do.
Find a way to stay around those people and around that job and around that industry. Because that's key. Otherwise, you'll end up miles behind and wondering like, I've been working this desk job for five years. My acting career has gone nowhere. When am I going to have the time to get that back? You might not.
Particularly post-COVID, it's so, so impactful on our industry because we've gone to almost exclusively self-tape culture now.
And that's just added another rung of the ladder to climb up because now everyone can see 300 applicants for a role. It's not like you're in the top 30 already like it used to be. You are one of just a sea of faces that they're looking at. So we have to get more creative now than ever when it comes to these types of jobs.
Because anyone can be famous. You can post a video of your friend falling down a hill on YouTube and suddenly he becomes hill guy and it's like on Ellen, you know? So you've got to be able to navigate that sea and prove to people why it's good to be trained. I'm not just some random guy. I know what I'm doing. I can do it consistently. That's huge.
What is your creative dream?
There's so many. And not to give like the boilerplate answer of like, oh, I'd love to win an Oscar. The one for me, because I'm not like uniquely positioned, but it's a rare position I have that I'm a US-UK dual citizen. I can work in both places. I would love to have a year where I film a motion picture out in Hollywood, I do a Broadway play, and I film a TV series in London.
And I think part of that for me is in my own head, I've now shown people I can do it anywhere.
What is your dream day job?
I don't even know if this qualifies as a technical day job, but it's something that I would love to do in conjunction with pursuing an acting career. It would be, like, being either, like, a sports commentator or involved in British football. Proper football, not hand egg.
And if I could find a balance between [acting and football]… I mean, I'm writing a play at the moment. I've just started a new play that I'm writing that is about how money has transformed the game of football. But it's really about how money transforms people.
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