Having spent a good deal of the holiday reading upcoming pilot scripts, I can tell you that we are in for even more procedural shows. There are more legal, medical, and military scripts than any other genre. So, what is casting looking for in your procedural audition?
First of all they’re looking for credibility. Whether you’re the expert witness, victim, patient, murderer, or attorney, you need to be believable. This doesn’t mean indicating or playing the dictionary definition of the role. It means embodying the role fully.
Take the murderer, for example. The audience may not even know that you’re the murderer, but when we find out we have a moment of recognition: “Yes! I knew it all along!” For the actor this means connecting to the parts of yourself that can feel the degree of rage, scorn, hurt, terror that would compel someone to kill. Not playing a killer, but embodying the emotions that would drive a killer.
If you’re the forensic genius, coroner, legal scholar, or some other type of expert you, of course, need to know the lines, but you also need to have a sense of natural ease with the technical dialogue. If it doesn’t sound like a second language coming out of your mouth, you won’t get the job. When you’re preparing, have fun getting to know the sounds and feelings of the words, from how they feel crossing your vocal cords to where they resonate in your body. If you simply memorize the lines, you’ll sound like an actor reciting. If you take the time to embody the words, you’ll sound like an expert speaking.
Once credibility is established, the people watching the audition can check that box and now see who you are and what you have to add to the role.
Procedurals can be a trap in that many of the roles can seem obvious and have little room for expansion. Don’t be fooled! The writing on television today is so much better than it’s ever been and the actor is expected to bring his humanity to even the smallest role.
You need a way of working that allows you access to your own unique emotional mapping so that you can turn the words on the page into a compelling three-dimensional human being. Knowing that your emotions are not thought in the brain but felt in the body, it becomes necessary to have a way to relax the mind and live fully in the body and the heart so that you can make the most honest, unique, and dynamic choices possible.
Every nurse, cop, doctor, coroner, clerk, etc., is a person, and the actor who understands that is the one who brings that something extra that books the role.
Now it’s time to give your audition the urgency that procedural auditions demand. In a procedural, it takes 40–45 minutes to commit, investigate, and solve a crime, or die, or crack the code. No room for slackers in this genre!
Let’s be clear that urgency does not mean pace. Pace is about speed, urgency is about energy.
A fun way to generate this energy is to “put a clock” on the scene. Be sure to choose a “clock” that isn’t generic but has personal resonance for you
“If I don’t get this information in the next five minutes, I’ll lose my job.” “I have a date with an amazing person whose one pet peeve is people being late.” “I am up for a promotion and this could seal the deal.”
Whatever gets your pulse racing!
Personal urgency places your specific heartbeat underneath the words, so make it important and make it yours.
Whether you’re the detective, the expert, the lawyer, the killer, or the loved ones of the victim, put a clock on whatever it is that you need and you’ll show the people in the room that you not only have a singular and interesting point of view on the character, but also that you also have a full understanding of the needs of the genre.
An audition is a job interview, and in a job interview the first thing the people hiring look for is whether you understand the needs of the job. This takes intelligence, awareness and discipline. Once you’ve done that work, you are free to be creative, to play, and to show them all of the wonderful things you and only you have to add to the role.
Like this advice? Check out more from our Backstage Experts!
The views expressed in this article are solely that of the individual(s) providing them,
and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Backstage or its staff.
