Yes, there are 9-5 jobs, and 9-5 jobs, of course. What everyone is agreed on (and quite rightly) is that, if you are holding down some kind of standard job, it has to have FLEXIBILITY, otherwise it is a non-starter for you. It can be hard enough finding energy after working long hours at another job to do your best work at auditions or in performance, let alone finding the time to actually win time away from work so that you can go to auditions. But you have to do it if you are serious about your acting career. The trick is to be working in either a) situations where the employers owe you personally very little e.g. most temp jobs and, where if you are 'let go' because you require too much time off, it is not exactly of life changing significance - although you may gain a bad reputation with temp agencies if they feel you are consistently unreliable. Alternatively, many temp jobs are on short term contracts, and you work on the basis that you earn money in spurts of activity, and then take 'downtime' to find acting work inbetween or b) situations where you find a job that you can do in close personal agreement with friendly and symapthetic management who will agree to work around other commitments and allow you flexible patterns of working so that, when you are working on a play, say, you can get away without having to be present at specific hours of the day, but can e.g. work evenings, weekends, call your own shift pattern. Another alternative is to have a skill that can be used from home.
Most actors are divided over whether or not it is desirable to be performing at all for no money. The current state of the industry (especially at its 'lower end') is such that 95% of all easily accessible jobs are paying nothing or next to nothing. Some will argue that this doesn't matter if you can find projects of good quality, nonetheless, and need to raise your profile through actual performance in order to secure the elements that *may* serve to increase your earning power within your chosen career, such as having a decent agency representation. Others would say that you are missing out on nothing by turning down non-paying jobs as a default, and working solidly to earn money elsewhere in the meantime, while waiting for relevant sounding auditions that will pay. Clearly, if you are being paid decent rates (not that these are always massively good in themselves, but still...) for the work you do while you are doing it, then you (temporarily, at least) should not need to be worrying about alternate supplies of money. So, you look for the paying work only, and spend the rest of the time outside of acting working to accumulate the money that will see you through the lean times. The only issue is whether or not, by failing to do acting work except sporadically, you are lessening your chances of being cast because you are not seen to be working, and you are failing to make good networking connections within the industry that help to smooth your path. This remains a very contentious debate, and every actor responds to the problem differently, though most find, after perhaps a year or two of being prepared to do non paying projects for the sake of experience, that they grow more and more reluctant to accept these.
One certainty is that, if you feel you can only sustain the lifestyle you want through being paid at the rate of 9-5 work, or that 9-5 work is of such abiding concern to you that you have no spare time (or money) to continue to improve your acting craft, and keep your interest rooted in the industry, then there is no point in trying to make it as an actor. You may as well keep acting as a hobby and go back to working steady hours.
