The security comes, as an actor, in knowing that you’re not in control. If you try to control your career, or how people perceive you, you’ll make yourself unhappy, because life doesn’t work like that. So much is luck. It’s much better to let yourself off, to think, ’There’s nothing I can do.’

Macfadyen frames an actor’s “security” as a paradox: it comes not from mastery but from accepting limited agency. In a profession governed by auditions, casting decisions, editing, publicity, and audience reception, attempts to micromanage outcomes can become a recipe for anxiety and dissatisfaction. By emphasizing luck and the impossibility of controlling perception, he advocates a stance akin to pragmatic stoicism—focus on the work and the choices you can make, and relinquish the rest. The closing thought (“There’s nothing I can do”) is less fatalism than self-compassion: permission to stop self-blame and to endure uncertainty without turning it into personal failure.