The sheer volume of television shows and viewing options being offered today has changed the entertainment landscape—including the way shows are cast. The order coming down from the networks and studio executives to casting departments is to hire dynamic actors who can hold and keep the audience’s attention. This is one of the reasons why casting is seeing such a wide range of actors for every role—unexpected is in!
Gone are the bad old days of branding yourself as the funny best friend, goofy sidekick or redneck construction worker and thinking that “playing your brand” will be enough to book the job.
This means that actors have to go deeper than ever before in their auditions. Going into an audition and playing the broad strokes of the character won’t work. Even roles that were once seen as archetypes and stock characters and are now more fleshed-out, real people.
In addition, the predominant tone of TV today has shifted to a more realistic naturalism. It’s not about playing a type anymore. It’s about being able to turn a set of lines into an interesting person who can keep the attention of an increasingly jumpy audience.
Oh, that jumpy audience! They are a huge reason for this shift in casting. With all of the distractions we have today, people’s minds and nervous systems are dangerously sped up and fractured. And the habit of jumping from device to device and channel to channel has taken the average amount of time that most people are able to focus on one thing down to 10 seconds or less.
READ: “3 Ways to Make Audition Material Your Own”
Programmers know this and are looking for the actors who are original, dynamic, and compelling enough to grab and hold the audience’s attention; today it’s all about surprising the audience so they don’t change the channel.
In this environment it’s essential to have a way of working that enables you to find not only the most honest intersection between you and the words on the page, but the moments of the piece that will pop with your specific energy and life.
For this reason, all three sense doors, the body, the heart, and the mind, must be in action when preparing your auditions—and in that order.
Preparing primarily in the mind, which the majority of actors do, means that you won’t add anything to the role. The brain is a literal organ: it shows you what is, not what could be. Its primary job is to keep you safe so it will do no more than offer you the logic of the piece and a few comfortable, uninspired ways to play it.
What will book you the job lies in the places where the emotions live: the body and the heart. Everything that has ever happened to you or been said to you lives in your body and has contributed to your emotional mapping. Isn’t that amazing? On a cellular level, you are the culmination of all of your experience thus far in life.
Given that that is the case, it’s essential to have a way of working that allows you to access all of this experience and emotional history so that you can bring it to the words on the page and create, from your own body and heart, a three-dimensional human being.
Working this way, you’ll never just play the “type” or be trying to sell a brand. Every role that you audition for will be fully embodied, rich with humanity and the specific qualities that you and only you can bring to the role.
Times have changed, quickly, and the jobs are going to the actors who are bold and surprising, not safe and expected. Don’t show them what they already know; the casting person knows that they are casting a nurse, lawyer, mother, or best friend. Show them what they don’t know: how interesting the role can be in the hands of an actor who is willing and able to explore all four corners of their emotional mapping and enliven the role in a way that no one else can.
Show them the exciting, original person they’ve been looking for all day long!
And for more acting advice, check out Backstage’s YouTube channel!
