I changed careers. Wrote a bit about it here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44699388

I never met a professional with a conceptual category of "selling out" within the industry. Scraping together any kind of living in the arts is a massive struggle, so everyone takes "money jobs" when they can get them. During my 10 or 12 years as a working actor I had two consecutive years during which my sole income was from performing, and maybe a couple of other other five or six month periods where I was able to drop restaurant (or whatever other) gigs for a tour. This was in the early-'oughts, and I'd have to look at my social security records to be sure, but my income during those years was somewhere around $30k. I was single, and really, really good at being poor.

By the way, that's like a 98th percentile result for an actor. Most people never come close to making a living, however meagre.

There's an old, old interview (maybe Michael Parkinson? Don't remember) with Joss Ackland - a wonderful mid-twentieth century British character actor, on stage and screen - where the interviewer asks him why the hell he did some crappy science fiction film, and Ackland says something like "that was 1962? Oh, yes. Well, my mother needed a new kitchen." No actor will ever fault him for that!

What does disappoint me is seeing actors with tremendous talent who take nothing but money jobs. I get why they do it - especially for the ones at the top of the commercial heap it'd be awfully hard to say 'no' to an easy gig that comes with a boatload of cash - but I can't help but feel sad that I'll never get to see them working at their best.

Even so, my response when I see a truly bad film is generally a shrug: "a lot of actors [and associated professionals / craft services] got paid." The artists among them will learn from even that experience, and many (many many) among them will invest that income back into doing work that they believe in.