Almost all of your time as a professional actor is spent preparing and rehearsing for a role and performance so, for all intents and purposes, acting is prep and rehearsal. Saying you want to be a professional actor is saying, in essence, “I want to be a professional preparer and rehearser.”
Preparation is not a tedious, annoying, and lonely affair—at least it shouldn’t be. Something like 95 percent of your time will be spent doing research, implementing your process on the material, and pregaming in the moments, minutes, or hours before your audition or performance. That’s the work of an actor.
Professional performers know this and not only love sharing their art via performance, but truly love the work itself. It’s in those hours of prep and rehearsal that you unleash a harmonious balance of intellectual, emotional, and experiential tools as you explore the text provided by the writer and then layer upon that context and your choices until you have what constitutes your most truthful and compelling option.
It’s in rehearsal that we can be gloriously experimental, free, and play without negative consequence. Every take yields valuable insight, whether the choices worked or didn’t. If you do as I do, you share this experience with a colleague, friend, or loved one, inviting their imaginations onto the palette of options. And when you rehearse with someone, you’re not only availing yourself of their creative contributions, but the rehearsal process becomes an enjoyable end unto itself. You spent time with another wonderful person doing something you love. Whether you book the job or succeed in performing what you intended, in a very real sense, you’ve already gained something of value.
It’s all too often a trap and source of torture for actors to find joy only in booking and the final performance. You can not—and will not—book most things you audition for. So it makes no sense to think of those hours spent prepping and rehearsing for jobs you didn’t book as a waste.
READ: 3 Essentials for Brilliant Work
No salesperson closes every deal. In sports, no player scores every time they’re at bat, on the court, or on the field. And yet they stand much less chance of closing or scoring if they don’t prepare or practice. The best in any profession do whatever it takes to do it at the highest level.
So it goes with us.
So set up your life to support the fullest and most enjoyable preparation and rehearsal time. Your body will not want to do something it doesn’t enjoy and you need your body on your side if you want to thrive as an artist. If you enjoy the work of the craft, you’ll find yourself going deeper, being more creative, more courageous, and finding brilliance in storytelling you otherwise would never have found.
I was once on call for one episode of a show called “Gortimer Gibbon’s Life on Normal Street.” My character was given almost a page and a half of non-sequiturs as a monologue in a five-page scene.
I was so excited to get to work on this because my lines were so crazy and random. And, of course, it was my job to justify each of those lines and make choices. So I decided to thread them all together, filling in the blanks in what became a five-minute monologue that I fully prepared and rehearsed. I wrote out the actual lines in black, and then wrote the fill-in language in blue.
On set, I gave a copy of the monologue to the showrunner, director, and writers, and said “Don’t feel obligated to use any of this. I just did it to create the context for my choices.” But they loved it. I did my monologue twice on set, they got what they needed, and I got an amazing reception. Afterward, I was invited to participate in a table read of the next episode and was told they wished they could use me in more episodes.
None of that would have happened if I didn’t prepare and rehearse to the best of my ability. And it would be so much harder to do so if I didn’t find joy in prep and rehearsal itself; if I looked at that work as a chore. I didn’t need to write and prepare a five-minute monologue within a five-page scene, especially one that the team was under no obligation to let me do on set. I could have done a professional-enough job just contextualizing and justifying each line separately. But people in this industry love working with other artists who go above and beyond to make each moment of each story great. That’s what inspires and what sells.
We can’t be brilliant in performance if we aren’t brilliant in prep and rehearsal. On set or in an audition is where we present the work. Prep and rehearsal are where we craft the work. You’re going to spend most of your time preparing and rehearsing for roles, jobs, and material that you won’t get and will never reach an audience. So be it.
In my ten years of experience as a casting session director, what most hurts actors in the room is being underskilled and underprepared. Preparation and rehearsal isn’t for others—it’s for you. If you want to be a consistently working professional, prepare.
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and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Backstage or its staff.
