As an actor, when you get the opportunity to audition for a big role, your key goal is to minimize mistakes. You strive to be error-free. You want to be an actor who doesn’t make mistakes.
There is a greater problem in casting. And that is having a session full of actors whose only goal is to deliver a perfect audition. So your main goal is to never miss a line or a pause because you think a pitch-perfect audition will get you the part.
Wrong. A pitch-perfect audition—one where your goal is to deliver a prefabricated, preset-in-concrete sequence of reactions—means you are the same as everyone else.
Because that is the goal of EVERY actor who is auditioning. In 30-plus years of casting, that is what I see time and time again: a concentration on dialogue and delivery accuracy.
Remember, I am seeing a plethora of actors, and all of them are right for the role. Conceivably, all of them can play the role. And they are delivering the same dialogue, one after the other.
Therefore a casting director experiences something like “Groundhog Day.”
It’s like cooking. When you start out, you follow the recipe to the exact ounce—every ingredient. As your confidence grows, you improvise. You add a pinch of this, a drop of that.
It’s the same with auditions. You deliver every comma, every syllable on the page—every practiced intonation and inflection.
So now every actor’s audition is identical.
How do you achieve individuality?
When you prepare your audition, you decide on exact responses and exact reactions at exact moments in the scene. You plot and plan to turn your head on this line, to raise your voice on this line, to show anger, and to take a pause of the correct length at the time the script tells you to so.
And if you achieve all of that, you have delivered a pitch-perfect audition. Just like the last guy who was in the room, and just like the next guy.
Do not plan responses. Allow relationships to happen.
As a casting director, when we see actor after actor doing the same lines, striving for perfection, we switch off. It is in the first 10 seconds of your audition that we decide if you are delivering something distinct.
You grab our focus by finding magic moments, small unfathomable unpredictable pieces of spontaneity.
What is the key to the success of major film actors? They keep us guessing. We do not know what is coming next. We sit fascinated because they always amaze us.
To achieve this, do not plan your reactions. Plan the relationship between the characters. If you know the relationship rather than the reaction, then every moment of your audition is flexible. You are prepared to discover the reactions when you arrive at that moment.
Sure, unpredictability is scary. Very scary. But right now, you are fearing mistakes. You must fear predictability more.
And you achieve this by avoiding a pitch-perfect audition.
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and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Backstage or its staff.
