Ashley Avis got the sides for a feature film two days before her audition. She memorized the six or seven pages, only to be told when she arrived that she'd received the wrong sides. The casting director gave her eight new pages "full of mummies attacking me and unpronounceable words of the fantasy genre," Avis says.
More commonly, casting directors for on-camera work sometimes ask actors to read a different scene instead of, or in addition to, the one they prepared, usually without benefit of having read the entire script. So actors can find themselves facing what cold reading guru Margie Haber calls the "frozen" reading.
But even getting the entire script in advance doesn't guarantee there won't be surprises. Rachel Kanouse recently received the script for a short film and was told which character she'd be reading for, yet she was thrown for a loop when she arrived at the audition and was asked to read for a different character, with about 30 seconds to prepare. She booked the job — in the original role. Fortunately, Kanouse likes cold readings. "There's a little bit of adrenaline rush," she says. "There's no set-in-stone way you think you should do it, and whatever happens, happens — which is what acting should be anyway."
Still, most actors need more than 30 seconds to prepare for a cold read. As Basil Hoffman writes in Cold Reading and How to Be Good at It, "A cold reading is not a 'cold' reading. No actor in a professional situation is ever asked to read from material that he has not prepared. And you must never do it.... Even when you have only a few minutes to prepare, you must find the real person in the role."
Explains TV and film director Ellie Kanner, co-author of How Not to Audition, "Some actors can just wing it. As an actor, you need to know what your strengths are. If you don't overthink it and don't spend too much time with the material, then you're okay with cold readings. But if you're the type who, every time you try that, you don't get a callback, then you need to ask for more time. Sometimes they may say, 'No, read it now,' and you do the best you can." But most casting directors will say yes. If you're asked to read an additional scene, Hoffman recommends saying, "I'd be happy to. How much time do I have?" He says actors are sometimes so overcome in the moment that they don't think in terms of their own best interests.
Actor Victor Warren — who, like Kanouse, loves the challenge of the unexpected — comments, "When you audition, whether hot or cold, you have to find a way to take control of the situation." Asking for time is one such way. Before reading for an Adam Sandler film, Warren was faxed some sides, but when he arrived he was given additional sides for several different roles. As he was looking them over, the casting director came out and asked, "Are you ready?" He replied, "No, I need a little more time." Says Warren, "If I don't feel ready, I'm not going to go." That doesn't mean he didn't love the challenge: "I immediately said in my mind, Who are these [characters]? I gave them different classes. I thought ideally I might get the chance to show a little range. I wasn't worried. It was cool."
Warren also does his homework: He asks his agent to let him know who'll be in the room and whether the audition will be taped. He looks up the auditors on the Internet Movie Database. The more information you have when you walk into a strange place, the better off you are, he says.
Like Warren and Kanouse, Annie Quinn finds that cold readings open you up to the unknown: There's no time for judgment, no time to wonder if you can do it. If there's no time to psych yourself out, she says, you find you can do surprising things.
But for others, not so much. Early in her career, Terry Ross showed up, fully prepared, to audition for a public service spot in San Diego, only to have the director say, "Why don't you read the guy's part?" "It was a completely frigid read," Ross says. "I asked for time to look it over, and they said no." She says these last-minute switcheroos are common in San Diego. After that experience, she realized she needed to create a method for cold readings. Now she teaches a cold reading technique based on Meisner's exercises. Handling Hurdles
Some actors have particular challenges to overcome. K.C. Clyde, for example, is severely dyslexic. One time he went to a callback for a film about a road trip and was suddenly given new sides and a video camera to incorporate into the scene. Camera in one hand, 13 or 14 unstapled pages in the other, he stumbled along before he finally stopped, saying, "I'm wasting your time. I apologize." Says Clyde, "I didn't hear back from those people for a very long time." Everything changed, however, when he learned Haber's phrase technique for cold readings, in which actors read dialogue in phrases and rhythms instead of individual words (see her book How to Get the Part‌Without Falling Apart). Recently, Clyde was given two or three new pages at an audition and found he had the confidence to do well.
You'll have fewer lines at commercial auditions than at other types, but you'll probably have less time to prepare them. Suzanne Voss always arrives early to get clues about what the advertiser wants the audience to feel. "That's what they're selling, in a way," she says. "A feeling: family, friendship. The product is in a sense the byproduct." In the waiting room, she looks at the sides and the storyboard to determine where her character is, whom she's with, what their relationship is, what happened right before — the basics for any audition. Sometimes she finds the actor she'll be reading with so the two can agree on blocking and eye lines. In the audition room, she asks for a minute to familiarize herself with the cue board, so that if she drops a line, her eyes will know where to go to pick it up again smoothly.
Theatre auditions can also sometimes be completely cold, meaning you get the sides when you arrive and have little if any time to prepare. Francis Jue faced just such a situation when he got a call out of the blue from playwright David Henry Hwang asking him to come in the next day to read a scene from Hwang's new play, Yellow Face. When Jue arrived, he was handed a 10-page scene and the reading began immediately — no remarks, no explanation. Important playwrights were in the room: Doug Wright, Theresa Rebeck, Arthur Kopit.
In the first four lines, Jue discovered that his character, HYH, was the father of the other character, DHH. On the first page he realized the two were on a speakerphone, a device with which HYH was unfamiliar, so Jue figured it was the 1980s. He realized then the play was semiautobiographical. Next he discovered that HYH was a banker. Toward the end of the scene, he learned that HYH was born in China, so he made his accent thicker. Jue also became aware that he wasn't old enough to play HYH, nor did he have the kind of alpha-male personality required for the role. "But I'm convinced that because I was listening, paying attention enough to what I was saying and listening to the other character, I convinced [Hwang] that I was capable of playing that part I was not right for," Jue says. And he did, Off-Broadway at the Public Theater.
Being a longtime improv performer helps Sean Michael Boozer. Sometimes his agent will tell him something about what's expected at an audition, he says, but when he gets there everything is different. In those cases, "you have to throw everything away" and change your mindset, he explains. In improv, "you're used to starting with one thing in your head and then you realize this is not the scene you had in your head." So he's able to be flexible when auditioning.
In improv it's also important to make strong choices, and the same goes for cold readings (in fact, all auditions). "Try and connect with something in the scene," advises Kanner. "A lot of actors in cold or even prepared scenes don't make a choice. Even if it's the wrong choice, I can say, 'I see what you did; do this instead.' If it's middle-of-the-road, it won't be memorable."
Shock and Auditor
"I love cold readings because you have to make quick, strong decisions," says Jue. "It's coming at you so quickly, you don't get in your own way. It's one choice at a time." He thinks that sometimes the first, instinctive choices you make at a cold reading are useful to remember later on, in rehearsal, and he recommends writing them down.
Recently, Jue had a cold reading for a musical to be performed in the New York International Fringe Festival. Someone had recommended him; he didn't know anything about the show. He was simply told to bring a song, which he did: a number from Into the Woods. When he showed up, the director said, "This is a rock show. Do you have a rock 'n' roll song?" Jue, to his mortification, didn't. So he was given a scene to read — a long tirade in which his character screams at his kid — and Jue poured all his frustration at not being prepared into that speech. He got the job. "I think the lesson I took is, for a cold reading, to pay attention to where you are at that moment in the room," he says. "Use what's going on with you instead of trying to conjure up what you think they want. I used my insecurity and fear."
The fact is you don't really know what they want. As the late Broadway casting director Michael Shurtleff wrote in his book Audition, "There's no way of knowing what the auditors want! I'm with them all day at auditions, yet I frequently don't know what they want. They frequently don't know. They'll know it when they see it. Do your own thing, which is prescribed by the circumstances of the scene."
And here's a story from actor Jim Jarrett. He had a callback for a one-minute national commercial for Dial soap. He was handed a paragraph of copy to read cold. Jarrett had read just two sentences when the director stopped him and said, "Good, you got the job." At the shoot, the actor asked the director how that instant decision had been made. "You reminded the head of the ad agency of her first boyfriend," said the director. Says Jarrett, "It goes to the heart of a teaching point. If actors knew why they did or didn't get the job, they'd go crazy. She could just as easily have hated her first boyfriend." The commercial ran for over a year and brought Jarrett a considerable chunk of change.
Actor Larry Lederman adds that cold reading is not about getting the words exactly right — that's homework for later. (Besides, the auditors already know the words: They've been hearing them all day.) It's about establishing a relationship with another character. "View the script as a guideline, not a bible," he suggests. He likes to keep one finger on his place in the script and focus on his scene partner. He also recommends avoiding the common trap of rushing. "Allow your character to make discoveries, form opinions, decide how to respond...experience the moment," he says.
And Haber adds these wise words: "Never apologize for a mistake! Hope and pray for a mistake! Then you're off automatic pilot. When you screw up, you actually become human." When acting, there's nothing better than that.