Every actor has an audition horror story, even the A-listers who star in your favorite films and TV shows. For years, Backstage has collected the best of the worst from today’s top performers. To make you feel a little less alone on your own journey to stardom, let’s look back at some iconic tales of in-the-room disasters, self-tape trip-ups, and chemistry reads gone wrong. First callback: Chris Evans.
Before he was changing the face of cable knitwear in “Knives Out,” wielding a vibranium shield in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, or traversing the postapocalyptic train of “Snowpiercer,” Chris Evans was just another aspiring performer grinding through the audition circuit—and sometimes, face-planting in front of Hollywood’s biggest names.
Years ago, Evans walked into what should have been a routine audition for “Observe and Report,” Jody Hill’s 2009 comedy starring Seth Rogen. What happened next was the stuff of actor nightmares. As Evans tells it, three lines into his audition, nerves got a hold of him and he had to stop mid-performance in front of Rogen and Hill. “My brain just started shrieking, just screaming, ‘No, no, no,’ ” he says of the experience. “Mid-audition, I said, ‘I’m sorry, guys. I’m sorry. I’ve got to stop.’ It’s even worse because they were incredibly nice about it, like, ‘No, it was great. You were doing great.’ I said, ‘Let me just go to the hallway and collect my thoughts.’ ”
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After psyching himself up for round two, he marched back into the audition room, only to melt down the exact same way. “My face just goes so red. I start sweating, and I have to stop again,” he remembers.
Most actors would have stopped then, but not Evans. He called his agent and said, “That was a fucking nightmare. Whether I get this movie or not, I can’t let that be the last taste they have in their mouths. I’ve got to come back tomorrow and do this again.” While his persistence was admirable, his execution still left much to be desired. The same “wave of heat” and panic hit him once more, and Evans finally admitted defeat.
“I just [said], ‘Guys, I’m so sorry. I’m just going to go,’ ” Evans says. “I did not get that role.”
Looking back, Evans says he would advise his younger self that there’s power to be found in stillness. “If you take a cup of water and you put a big handful of salt in it and you taste it,” he says, borrowing from Buddhist wisdom, “it’s going to taste like shit. If you take that same handful of salt and you put it in a lake and you take a sip of the lake, you can’t taste the salt at all. Be the lake; don’t be the water. The salt is a finite thing. The salt is your pain, your struggle. Just be more than what you think you are, and the suffering that the ego wants to put you through just can’t compete with that perspective.”
For anyone facing their own audition horror story, Evans’ journey from sweaty disaster to mainstream success should offer both hope and a lesson. The difference between those who make it and those who don’t is less about never failing and more having the gumption to walk back into that room (face flushed and all), ready to try again. After all, if Captain America can survive being frozen in Arctic ice, surely you can survive your next audition.