Joshua Bitton has been working in New York and Los Angeles for over two decades — HBO prestige drama, network TV, film, and now Broadway and co-founding the Ojai Theatre Festival with Jon Bernthal. In this Mriia Mentors session, he shared everything Ukrainian actors need to know about breaking into the American market.
"As an actor you need the skin of an elephant, the heart of a lion, and the patience of an angel. Not one or two of those — all three."
Joshua's first paying theatre job was a children's theatre tour about slaves escaping north during America's slavery era. They toured the northeast, including deeply rural areas — places where some families openly held white supremacist views and had told their children that slavery was a myth. The experience shaped his understanding of what theatre could actually do in the world.
His first television job was a commercial for the Cartoon Network. He played a security guard who got into a fight with Yogi Bear after the cartoon character forgot his ID. He made about $250 a week from the tour and was thrilled.
"I'm usually a better person when I'm acting than when I'm not. For most actors, that's true — and finding avenues to keep doing the work is what it's all about."
— Joshua BittonHe studied at Rutgers University's Mason Gross School of the Arts — one of America's most respected MFA acting programs, which grew from the same William Esper / Meisner tradition that would later shape his own teaching. The program regularly showcases graduating actors for agents and casting directors, which is part of how he built his early career momentum in New York.
Joshua misses the days of auditioning live in the room with a director and casting director. Some of that is returning — Zoom auditions, occasional in-person sessions — but the self-tape is now the standard, and he has worked out a clear approach.
"Get a reader who knows what they're doing. Another actor. Someone you can actually listen and respond to — not someone reading flatly off a page."
— Joshua BittonHe noted that gender doesn't have to match but it helps when it can — if the scene is with a woman and you have the opportunity, take it. If the scene is with someone non-binary and you have a non-binary friend, there's no good reason not to ask them.
The good take is almost always two, three, or four. Actors who do 20 takes beat themselves into exhaustion and create fatigue around auditioning that makes them want to stop doing it.
Walk into a live audition in the US with a can of beer and you'll make everyone uncomfortable. Crack a beer in a self-tape and nobody minds. It's irrational, but it's true — use it.
Joshua's students are in constant group text threads: "I need a reader for this." A community of actors helping each other with self-tapes is one of the most practical assets you can build.
If you've genuinely found two completely different ways into a scene, send both takes. Only if they're truly different — not two versions of the same choice. Casting directors will watch further when they're surprised.
When you get a scene with no context — sometimes as little as a paragraph — Joshua has a two-phase process. First, use the left side of your brain: read everything you're given, including breakdowns for other characters, any context above and below the sides. Ask the basic structural questions: What does my character want? What is my relationship to these people? Where do the beats change? What do I need from the other person?
Then do the emotional homework. If your character has lost someone, do the imaginative preparatory work on what that person means to you, where that loss sits in your body. Not just intellectually — physically.
"If I've done that right, I try to throw it all away. Show up, listen, respond, and be as free in the work as I can be. If I'm wrong, it doesn't matter."
— Joshua BittonHe auditioned for The Hobbit films with two pages of script and no context. He and a friend deduced that the king in the scene must be mentally unstable — deranged, unpredictable. He taped it that way, got a callback, went into the room. The casting director told him it was the wrong interpretation entirely. Then said: but it showed her he knew how to make choices.
When Joshua first moved to LA, he joined a recreational baseball team because he'd played in college. He wasn't thinking about networking. He found out later that the team included the vice president of CBS Television, the writer of the Avengers films, and two television writers. He developed real personal friendships with them — and work eventually came through some of those relationships, not because they owed him anything, but because they knew and respected his work.
"Do your work, and the relationships will come to you. That's more honest and more effective. John Bernthal didn't build those relationships. He did his work, and those relationships found him."
— Joshua BittonHe's more skeptical of deliberate networking strategies — going to industry parties, getting a job somewhere producers go, engineering casual proximity. Not because they can't work, but because they rarely feel real and they often distract from the actual work.
Joshua was direct about how difficult this is for international actors — and realistic about the paths that actually work.
```The easiest path to a US agent is being successful in your own market or region first. A Ukrainian or European agent with relationships in the UK or US can make introductions that a cold submission never will. England is often a soft entry point into the American industry.
Getting into a US graduate acting program gives you a student visa, access to institutional support, and a showcase at the end of your program where agents and casting directors attend specifically to find new talent. Schools like Juilliard, Yale, NYU, UCLA, USC, and UNC School of the Arts all do this — and many have financial aid for international students.
Get into a class where the work is serious and the other actors are working. Your classmates become your ecosystem — they'll recommend you to their agents, bring you into their projects, and introduce you to their people. This is how it actually moves.
Not just fluency — malleability. Being able to soften your accent or work in dialects expands what you can audition for. Eastern European actors in the US frequently get seen only for Eastern European roles: Russian gangsters, Holocaust films. Dialect work opens the full range. Joshua does dialect work constantly — Irish, British, American regional. He says with his face, dialects are what keep him employed.
Joshua trained under Bill Esper at Rutgers — and considers Esper, who passed away in 2019, his defining mentor. The William Esper Studio in New York continues to run under his family and is one of the most serious Meisner-based training environments in America. Importantly for international actors: the Esper Studio is recognised by US immigration authorities and can sponsor M-1 visas.
```In 2007, Joshua and Jon Bernthal were filming HBO's The Pacific together in Melbourne. They spent their first day walking the city for seven hours, and somewhere in that walk, both admitted something they'd been carrying quietly for years: they wanted to start a theatre company together.
In 2025, that conversation became the Ojai Theatre Festival — conceived by Joshua, Jon Bernthal, and Isidora Goreshter, staged in a century-old school auditorium in Ojai, California that they renovated and donated back to the local school district. The inaugural production was Ironbound by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Martyna Majok. Jon Bernthal and Marin Ireland starred. All profits went to Nordhoff High School's theatre program.
"Give us a play about what it's really like to be in Kyiv right now, or to come from the east of Ukraine. Tell us that story. People would be quite hungry for it."
— Joshua BittonHe said this directly to the session participants — and he meant it as practical advice, not encouragement. Stories about the Ukrainian experience, told honestly from the inside, are not well-represented in international theatre and film. That gap is an opportunity.
```"You are enough. There is no other person like you. The more open, vulnerable, and present you are in your own skin — the more singular and interesting your work will be."
— Joshua BittonHis second most important piece: get yourself out of a beggar mentality. Knowing your worth is not the same as thinking you're famous when you're not — it's understanding what you genuinely have to offer, so that you're not giving it away to people or projects that don't deserve it.
To absorb the director who gives brutal, humiliating notes. The actor on an ego trip. The three roles you were told you had — and then didn't get. It will happen. The skin protects the work.
To share your guts on screen and stage. To be unafraid. What we do as artists involves that kind of exposure — and it cannot be done from behind armour.
A close friend of Joshua's is now quite famous. It took many, many years. The patience isn't passive — it's the willingness to keep doing the work while the world catches up.
Go see dance. Go to art exhibitions. Get outside. Actors who only consume acting stop having anything interesting to bring to it. The richest performances come from people who are living something.
On bad advice: he said at some point he stopped letting it into his brain. "My own brain gives me bad advice constantly — it tells me I'm not good enough. I try not to listen to that, let alone what some person said."
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