Backstage Experts

A 2013 Career Checklist for Child Actors and Parents

As the calendar turns toward another year, it is a good time to refocus and reevaluate priorities within the entertainment business. We all have things we want to work on in 2013, and the following are some ideas that kids and parents can add to their list of resolutions.

How To Find Inspiration

The reason we often don’t experience greater moments of inspiration and creativity in our own work is that we quit at the “frustration” phase, not knowing that this stage is an important part of our creative development.

How To Discover Your Inner Truth

Here’s one of my favorite questions I ask my students to think about when working on a scene: What is your character’s unspoken truth? What is it your character is afraid to reveal about himself?

4 Tips for Memorizing Lines for Young Performers

Reading and acting are completely different. Someone may be a great reader but a so-so actor or vice versa. If reading is getting in the way of acting, then memorizing lines may be what your child needs to do in order to have a successful audition.

How To Gain Acting Success Like Edie Falco

The pace to a self-sustaining acting career varies. More often than not, the journey for actors being able to “do what they love” and nothing else without financial worry is a curving pot-holed course of great distance traveled until smooth straightway is rode.

Why Your Exit is Just as Important as Your Entrance

In the business of acting, we usually talk about making an entrance. There’s a focus on how you enter rooms, start scenes, and begin working with people. Yet a very important factor in the unfolding of your life and career is how you exit.

What Are the Stakes of Your Audition?

Ah, the odds. The chances. The stakes. To most actors starting out, auditioning can seem like a daunting, terrifying, and insurmountable responsibility. A contest. A game of luck and chance.

Why Learning Acceptance Is Important as an Actor

We are a culture obsessed with self-improvement. It seems every time we turn around we are being told that there is something else about us that needs to be changed – our weight, our clothes, our attitudes, even our eyelashes!

Want to Change Your Life and Book the Job? Let's Talk Physics

We have a hard time connecting to that truth because we’re stuck on the physical form of matter. We look at ourselves and see things we don’t like. We’re too fat or too old or don’t look like Heidi Klum.

How To Make Your Inner Journey Inform the Outer

For many of us, we’ve never been taught to identify with an inner journey. So we seek continuously outwardly. Partly this is due to our living in a culture that only measures results by the things we achieve and the amount of money we make.