In a 25-person casting session, there are only five people who are truly competing for the job. This was the opinion of a group of casting directors with whom I recently spoke. What do the five know that the other 20 don’t?
They know what’s interesting about themselves. It’s nice to say you can just be yourself in the audition, but that’s only the beginning. You need a way of working that allows you access to the four corners of your personality, as well as the specifics of your emotional mapping, so that the people in the room see you at your most interesting and unique.
In large ways, it’s true that we’re all the same; it’s in the details that we’re different. Accessing and embracing these details requires a disciplined practice of self-awareness: looking at all the events of your life through the lens of an artist and gathering self-knowledge and insight for the purpose of giving it back to the world.
The five have the insight to find the true intersection between themselves and the words by discovering and living in the details of their own personalities. They know that the hallmark of all great art is specificity.
They think like writers. After you’ve found your heartbeat in the piece, it’s time to play detective with the writing and see what clues the writer is offering you.
Acting training in the U.S. tends to be heavily performance based and often doesn’t give actors the skill set to analyze text and think like a writer. It’s very important that you get good at this though, especially for auditioning.
If you find one small detail in the text that no one else does, it could be enough to get you the job. The differences between who books and who doesn’t are truly minuscule.
I started my career as a development executive and have a great passion for writers and text. Working with writers I’d encourage them to only write the script to 80 percent, and to leave 20 percent for the director’s vision and the actor’s performance. Good scripts are written this way and smart actors know how to find that 20 percent and how to do something with it. They understand what the writer has written and recognize what the writer has intentionally not written. They know the meaning behind the sentence structure, the syllable counts, repetitions, numbers, pronoun changes, and they allow all of this information to enrich the decisions they’ve made. In this way, the writer and actor work together to bring the piece to life in a rich, intelligent and multi-layered way.
Now it’s time to take all of this insightful, smart, dynamic work into the room. Not to read or perform, but to talk.
The five realize that TV/film, bottom line, is about is people having conversations, and that their job is to have the most dynamic, connected conversation possible.
Because there is such a premium put on naturalism today, the people in the room don’t want to see an actor playing a scene or robotically delivering one line on top of the other. They want an actor living in the moments of a real conversation. A real conversation is filled with reactions, quirks, laughing, sighing, and if all of your work is living in your body, you’ll be free to let those moments happen, and to have the sort of alive and unpredictable conversation that books the job.
Remember, this isn’t magic. You are free only to the degree that you are prepared.
In order to be one of the five dynamic beings who are competing for the role, all three of these elements have to work together. You need to be the specific, detailed artist who has the awareness of what is most interesting about themselves, the skilled technician who can analyze the text and find the gems that others will miss, and the actor who knows that all of these insights and skills must be felt and stored in the body so that they can let it all go and have the natural, powerful, singular conversation that will make you the one that books the job.
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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.
