In 2007, Gillian Wearing placed an advert – in newspapers, online, in job centers, and elsewhere. It read: “Would you like to be in a film? You can play yourself or a fictional character. Call Gillian.” Of the hundreds of people who replied, seven – chosen through an extended process of auditions, interviews, and workshops – ended up appearing in Self Made. Of those seven, five in particular use the acting technique known as Method to delve into their memories, impulses, anxieties, fears, fantasies, and inner resources to create a series of individual performance vignettes, their personal ‘end scenes’, that reveal with particular intensity and clarity who they really are deep down – or who, in another version of their lives, they might easily have been.
