Whatever happened to those wonderful little characters who made movies feel so alive?

In this LIVE recording of The Working Actor NYC Podcast, Benjamin Howes and Patrick Richwood explore a provocative theory: that Hollywood has been cutting small speaking roles from film and television to save money — and that both audiences and working actors are paying the price.

Patrick made some of his most memorable appearances playing exactly those kinds of characters in Pretty Woman, The Princess Diaries and Beaches.

We'll talk about what these roles contribute to storytelling, whether they're really disappearing, and what it means for actors trying to build sustainable careers.

Are actors ever satisfied?

We want the job — then we get the job and complain that we’re exhausted. We want more auditions — until one arrives with twelve pages due tomorrow. We want people to love our work — and when they do, somehow we’re still thinking, “Yeah… B-minus.”

So what is it about being an artist that keeps us perpetually looking toward the thing we haven’t achieved yet?

Flying solo this week, Benjamin turns to the live audience to explore the tension between ambition, gratitude and dissatisfaction — with some unexpected perspective from trailblazing performer and Tony nominee L Morgan Lee, who happened to join the conversation.

We talk about Martha Graham’s idea of the artist’s “blessed unrest,” the difference between useful self-examination and simply beating yourself up, and whether dissatisfaction can actually be a tool: if it gives you somewhere to go, it has value.

Plus, we put the audience through the Actor Satisfaction Test: Would you rather have five auditions and book none, or no auditions at all? Steady work that’s creatively fine, or less work that’s extraordinary? And if you could make a comfortable living as an actor for the rest of your career — but your career never got substantially bigger — would that be enough?

Maybe the goal isn’t to stop wanting more.

Maybe it’s learning to recognize what we’ve already built while still letting that “blessed unrest” point us toward what comes next.

What happened to the working actor?

Self-tapes made auditioning more convenient — but shifted much of the cost and infrastructure of auditioning onto actors. Streaming created enormous amounts of content — but changed the residual model that once helped performers sustain a career between jobs. Seasons have gotten shorter. Roles are being compressed. And some of the television jobs that once represented the next rung on the ladder for working actors are now attracting major movie stars.

So Benjamin Howes and Patrick Richwood ask a bigger question: Is the traditional working-actor career becoming harder to sustain?

And if it is, where should actors be looking for opportunity?

As Hollywood increasingly operates with the financial priorities of a technology business, commercially successful entertainment is also beginning to emerge in unexpected ways outside the traditional studio pipeline. Films like “Obsession” and “Backrooms” suggest that creators may no longer need to wait for the legacy system to give them permission to start building something valuable.

This isn’t a conversation about giving up on Hollywood or declaring the traditional system dead. It’s about recognizing that the structure is changing — and asking whether actors need to change the way we think about building a career along with it.

Maybe the question isn’t how we recreate the working-actor career of twenty years ago.

Maybe it’s: What does a sustainable working-actor career look like for the next twenty?