Even if they don't consider community theater roles to be relevant experience, a casting director/interviewer shouldn't be caught off guard by them.
If an interviewee has a pet operating system they've developed they can probably figure out your CRUD app.
Does it work like this? I guess it depends on the point in actor's career. If they're 10+ years into commercial acting, then community theare might not be relevant, but at the start of one's career, it seems to me to be highly relevant. At the very least, it demonstrates the person knows the basics of acting, can follow the script, and has experience dealing with the support structure (director, sound/lighting technicians, etc.). This isn't fundamentally different from what they'll face when shooting a commercial.
Also: at least over here in Poland, most film actors come from classical theatre background, they study in theatrical schools. Any kind of theatrical background is highly relevant.
How about we hold those people accountable to the same standards? Hell, most of your politicians are that way.
You have dentists commenting on how pandemic response should be.
For the last 4 years a failed business man con artist destroyed pretty much all he could get his hands on and he's still hailed as some sort of mythical creature.
> Imagine in any other industry, where the candidate mentions irrelevant job experience, and expect that to be the criteria for acceptance into the job.
Are you f'in kidding me? Either we hold the other useless part of society to the same standards we hold ourselves accountable to or we give each other a break.
EDIT: and for all the ignorant folks thinking Trumps schoolyard bully rhetoric did anything but empower the CCP keep in mind that Chinas nickname for Trump is "Chuan Jian Guo". Trump the nation builder(guess who's nation they are talking about). And as much as I disliked Obama and his TPP, it was the answer to the new silk road. Trump basically handed China the entirety of Asias future on a silver platter, and in return the US got what? 10 billion in trade deficit balances? Completely laughable. Or the new Blue Dot(completely fitting name by the way)?
https://asiatimes.com/2019/11/a-blue-dot-barely-visible-from...
Blue Dot is described, officially, as promoting global, multi-stakeholder “sustainable infrastructure development in the Indo-Pacific region and around the world.”
It is a joint project of the US Overseas Private Investment Corporation, in partnership with Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the Japan Bank for International Cooperation.
Now compare it with what just happened this same week at the inauguration of the China International Import Expo in Shanghai.
As Xi stressed: “To date, China has signed 197 documents on Belt and Road cooperation with 137 countries and 30 international organizations.”
For example, an actor applying for a role in a commercial might cite their side role in doing a theatrical production of hamlet for their community, but the interviewers (an advertising production agency) might only want to care how much professional experience they have shooting commercials.
Sure, these experiences in "unrelated" work might show qualities that could be applied to this job. But you aint paid for your broad and wide interests in the topic - you are paid on being able to implement some work/feature that somebody else told you to do. And in fact, if you require intrinsic motivation to actually perform well, you might end up being a liability to the team, rather than an asset - after all, if the work is boring, and you lack intrinsic motivation for it, you might slack off, or over-engineer it to make the work more interesting to you. Or you might end up being a difficult person to work with for other team members because you sit so far above them intellectually.