GlennAlterman

Glenn Alterman

By Ron Sklar

FabulMag Contributing Writer

Your trusted doctor. A powerful CEO. A thoughtful husband. Your favorite professor. And a teenage girl screaming for her favorite band. As one of New York’s most successful commercial models and actors, Glenn Alterman has portrayed all of these.

Before we delve, of course, we must explain the teenage girl.

“It was for a Wendy’s TV commercial,” Glenn says. “I play a hysterical fourteen-year-old girl. They had this old Beatles footage of the fans yelling. I was one of the girls. We had to scream like crazy girls and they superimposed our faces on the faces of the Beatles’ fans. It was nice money, but it was the most bizarre commercial I’ve ever done.”

Let’s remain in the bizarre for just one more moment: how about Glenn’s headshot starring as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke?

“I got a call from the Conan O’ Brien show yesterday,” Glenn explains. “They said I look like Ben Bernanke and they want to use my picture on the show that night. I never left my apartment, but they used my headshot. They were doing this whole spoof. The request came at three in the afternoon and I was on TV at 12:30 at night.”

Glenn is on TV a lot of other times as well. You’ll recognize him from commercials for MasterCard and American Express, and even American Airlines (in a spot with James Gandolfini). You also will pass him on billboards and see him when you turn pages in magazines.

“This year’s income has doubled from last year,” Glenn says. “I’ve done a lot of professors, a lot of CEOs, a lot of Mediterranean type of characters. Real upscale, tuxedo stuff. Business ads. The tech and the money magazines. I played the maitre’d at Sardi’s. A lot of that kind of stuff. Really, in these last fifteen years, it’s radical. I’m probably one of the top [models] in the middle age/senior kind of category.”

Like many of his generation, it’s been a long, strange trip for Glenn, the journey starting with his early modeling days in the sixties.

“I don’t even know what possessed me,” he recalls of his entrance into the profession. “I was in college, in Boston, and I went to Emerson. Maybe out of vanity, I went to a couple agencies and they said, ‘yeah, we’d like to work with you.’ And at one point, while I was in college, I was probably the top male model in Boston. I had a full head of hair then. I got everything from commercials to print. I did some stuff that was in GQ. I did a lot of fashion. I was very young. I was 18 or 20. I booked all the time while I was going to school.

“The joke was that I had all this success in Boston, and then I came to New York and I signed up with Wilhelmina. In Boston, I was the big fish in the little pond, but when I was in New York, I was a little, little fish in the big pond. I was the biggest thing in Boston and in New York I couldn’t get arrested. I booked once in a blue moon. And then there was a stretch where I left Wilhelmina and started going for commercial print. I never really was a fashion type, but I thought I was. In Boston, you can do commercial print and fashion.”

The New York market, as many transplanted models find, is a totally different animal.

“I’ll tell you the truth,” he says. “My career had spiked in the last ten years. When I started losing my hair is when I had a lot of problems. And back in the late eighties, my look was not really in. I was not that Proctor and Gamble blonde-hair-and-blue-eyes guy. I looked more Middle-Eastern, and I would book occasionally. When I shaved my head and grew my beard is when I became a type, and it’s been non-stop for about fifteen years now.”

Time, it seems, is definitely on Glenn’s side, as the desirable demographics for advertisers appear to link up exactly with his age.

“Fifteen years ago, if I was this age, I would probably be out of work,” he says. “I get more castings now than I had in the seventies and eighties. I’ve booked a lot more. It’s been a resurgence for me, career wise.”

His career is not limited to print modeling. He is also one of New York’s most highly respected monologue coaches, and both models and actors come to him for help in booking those highly prized commercials.

He has published sixteen books on the subject, and many of his students have already read at least one of them before they call him for personalized instruction. Glenn seems to make it look easy, but he knows the cold truth: it’s one of the most competitive and difficult gigs to land.

“What I do is very specific,” he says. “I am a monologue audition coach. I am not an acting coach. There are a few things an actor needs. First of all, you need a great headshot. To me, it’s the most important thing. Some actors try to save money or they just don’t know how to scrutinize photographers. The headshot is everything. It’s everything. Even if you get an agent, what can they do? They submit your headshot.

“Then the resume. And once you have those two things going, you have to be able to show somebody you can act. So these monologues are really where I come in to play. I talk with models and actors on the phone. I get a sense of them and talk to them for a while. And then they come to the studio and I have 6000 monologues. So I have a tremendous pool to draw on. Most of the time, I’m right on the money finding them the right material. And then I work with them on everything from walking in the door and how to present themselves, to what to say and what not to say, and how to perform the monologue. It’s the whole audition experience. It’s a very necessary step. An actor without a monologue is like a model without photographs. It’s a necessary step.”

Another necessary step, Glenn advises, is to develop a thick skin, but not too thick.

“If you get too thick a skin, you become hard,” he says. “It’s easy to be hard, like the song says. Rejection hurts, no matter how you do it. One of the things I love about modeling is it’s so subjective. It’s in the eye of the beholder. I’m not being rejected because of anything I’ve done. What I love about modeling is I don’t take it personally, because they didn’t want a guy who was over six foot or they didn’t want a guy with a beard, or they didn’t want somebody who was bald. What I’ve done is create a niche for myself, when they want a certain category: professors, shrinks, CEOs. There are certain categories that I know I’m going to get called for. I also have a look that is European that can play there as well as here.”

In the meantime, Glenn’s face is everywhere, and his advice is well heeded.

“Even though you are looking directly at the camera,” he says, “your concentration is on something inner. You’re creating a character. If they want a doctor in a certain image, you are really focusing on that and the camera just happens to be there. The more you stare at the camera, the less successful you’ll be. You have to focus more of what is going on in the inside, what you are trying to create. What the impression is. You find out from the ad people and the photographer what they are trying to sell and how they are trying to sell it. What they are looking for in the shot. There are a lot of people involved, and you just have to learn how to be part of the collaboration. You have to know your place in the whole situation. And that’s where it gets tricky more than anything. It’s learning to be business like and professional and do the job. You have to learn how to develop business like relationships.”

Glenn will continue to play to consumers all over the world, although that’s not all he does.

“It’s not a big boasting male thing,” he says of his career as a male model. “It’s more for women. They are more verbose about it. Most of the guys I know who do modeling and acting will say they are actors before they say they are models. I don’t know if it’s a stigma that we have. I say I do modeling, but it’s not my top thing. I say I do a lot of things. I write books, I coach, I do commercials. Most people who ask me what I do, I say, ‘you got an hour?’”

For more information about Glenn Alterman’s books and coaching, go to

www.glennalterman.com

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