Modern distributed applications are difficult to develop. The actor model is helpful as it is designed for modularity and composition. However, the actor model does not support shared state. For this, developers often use an external database, which integrates poorly and causes anomalies. We argue that some form of native shared memory is useful for a large class of distributed applications. To integrate cleanly with the actor environment, this shared memory should support the transactional causal consistency model. This model provides the strongest consistency compatible with high availability and is compatible with the actor model and its common optimizations.