You could use a generator expression and next instead. This would be more efficient as well, since an intermediate list is not created and iteration can stop once a match has been found:
actor = next(actor for actor in self.actors if actor.name==actorName)
And as senderle points out, another advantage to this approach is that you can specify a default if no match is found:
actor = next((actor for actor in self.actors if actor.name==actorName), None)