So you’ve seriously thought about it, and have decided that next year is the year you become an actor—but you don’t know where to start. We’ve got you! Definitely dive into our in-depth guide to getting started in the business, but what’s better to get you motivated than first-person advice from some of the industry’s most inspiring stage and screen actors?
If you’re looking to seriously pursue a career in acting in the new year, let these insights from some of our favorites guide you through every stage of the process.
Kate Winslet: Use your first auditions to your advantage.
Auditioning is a skill unto itself, which is why actors early in their career must take them for all they’re worth. “[Auditions are] a really important part of a young actor’s life, because you learn your adrenaline levels, you learn how to calm your whole nervous system down,” Winslet explains. “And the process helps enormously in terms of becoming unselfconscious—being able to walk onto a film set and not have that devil on your shoulder going, ‘They think you’re shit. You shouldn’t be here.’ It takes a lot to get through those feelings and move beyond them, and the audition process is helpful in that.”
Riz Ahmed: Take calculated risks in your budding career.
Sure, Ahmed’s got an Oscar nomination now, but his career really took off because he decided to take a leap of faith and trust the process. “I had to fly myself to L.A. for a callback, and that was, like, half of what I had in my bank [account]. So I had to bet on myself,” he remembers. “Those times are scary, and they can be really dark. But what I found, weirdly, is [in] those times when you’re reminded that you don’t control anything, there’s a creative breakthrough just on the other side of it. It’s that surrender; being reminded that you’re not in control is the artist’s greatest superpower.”
Ariana DeBose: Learn your industry inside and out.
Before she landed a role in the iconic remake of “West Side Story,” Debose took what she calls a “real-world approach to the business.... The way I chose to educate myself was getting online and going to the Actors’ Equity site, understanding what a breakdown looks like, really reading it, and noticing: These names keep showing up. Why are they important right now? What kind of work do they produce? I could walk into a room and understand: That’s Kevin McCollum—he produced A, B, and C. This is Sergio Trujillo—he’s done this many shows with this director.”
Angela Bassett: Draw inspiration from everywhere.
“The answer, or inspiration, comes from where you least expect it,” says Bassett. “From just passing someone on the street, and there’s something about their walk, their talk… It’s being observant of human nature. Then, of course, your own experiences are very helpful, too—sense memory, the things you’ve encountered in your own life. Reading, seeing theater, being inspired by others and their work, so that you’re open and fearless—fearless about choices.”
Jurnee Smollett: Build your first character’s internal life.
There are many well-documented methods for getting into character, but all of them require a deep understanding of who your character is. “Being able to think as the character was the hook into understanding her, bringing her to life,” Smollett explains about her role as Letitia “Leti” Lewis on “Lovecraft Country.” “That’s the high you chase after as an actor, to just be able to think their thoughts and feel their emotions. And that translates to your behavior, to the choices you make, how you communicate outwardly. Having that inner life is the goal.”
Nicolas Cage: Failure will only help you learn.
“Work as much as you can,” says Cage. “Good or bad, fall on your face or stand up—but get so in tune with your instrument that you know it so well that you know when it’s working or when it isn’t working.”
Kenan Thompson: Make connections now to build a solid team later.
Thompson credits his first and only manager, Michael Goldman, with instilling in him a frank understanding of the industry that you can’t learn in an acting class. “He’s the one who sat me down and broke it all down,” Thompson says. “What you should do at auditions, how you should follow up with people, knowing the ins and outs of who’s running what projects, and how to figure out if there’s a spot for me, or if there’s an opportunity to convince people to think outside the box and let me play a character they didn’t necessarily write for me.”
Daniel Kaluuya: Lean on the network you already have.
Kaluuya’s top piece of career advice for early career artists? “[Get] with friends and do it,” he offers. “And look around you, don’t always look up. Because the people that you perceive as ‘up’ are busy so it’s harder to build with them. So I always looked around me, I grew up with people around me.”
Gillian Anderson: Do your best, no more no less.
“Go in prepared, and feel like you’ve done everything that you could do, even if that means that you only had half an hour, but you worked your ass off,” says Anderson. “If you feel like you went in there and you did the best that you could do, then the result is none of your business, and it’s certainly out of your hands. If it’s meant for you, it will be yours. And if it is not meant for you, it won’t be.”
Thuso Mbedu: Make fans in every audition room you walk into.
Her “Underground Railroad” audition came in 2018, and Mbedu didn’t think she had a chance. “I don’t have the accent,” she told herself at the time. “But perform, give it your all, and just hope that you will be in the archives, or you will be in the back of the minds of the casting director for other productions that they have coming up.”
Marlee Matlin: Connect with artists who inspire you.
“I’m the kind of person who thinks, Who is it that I can reach out to? It’s not necessarily easy to do. But it shouldn’t stop you from giving it a try,” she says. When a character on Aaron Sorkin’s series “Sports Night” mentioned having a deaf sister, Matlin contacted Sorkin to say she was a fan and, yes, asked for the part. Not long after she took the prolific writer-director to lunch—“Chinese food,” she remembers—he created Joey Lucas on “The West Wing” for her. “So I’m always happy to approach people, to be assertive,” she says with a shrug. “I’ve never been one who’s been afraid. I hustle.”
Joseph Gordon-Levitt: Stop selling yourself short (and focusing on the wrong things).
“Don’t consider yourself an ‘aspiring actor,’ ” he says. “Just do that. Do the ancient, universal art of acting. Don’t worry about being a Hollywood actor.”
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