A watched pot never boils, right?
Does a phone waiting for a callback ever ring?
Waiting to hear about the outcome of an audition is nervewracking, but it doesn’t have to be that way!
Professional actors are reported to have some of the highest levels of anxiety (per capita) and many of them attribute this to the uncertainty of the industry.
Think about it. On a daily basis how much are you really sure of?
We are faced with things like not knowing when our next role (and next paycheck) will come around, whether the auditions we went on went as well as we thought they did, whether the projects we committed to will end up getting funded and go into production, and so much more.
What if you could take almost all of the uncertainty out of the equation? See just about everything hinges on getting some predictability on one thing: the outcome of your auditions.
If you can generate enough auditions (more on that in a bit), turn a good portion of those into bookings and repeat that over and over again you become a full time a working actor in no time.
Here’s how…
The key to doing this is being completely honest with yourself in the moment. Here’s what I mean…
If you study top performers across any industry or line of work, you will quickly notice a pattern. Top hedge-funders and investors evaluate their investing decisions and use what they learn on their next investment.
Athletes review their games or matches and evaluate what they did well and what they could have done better. In fact, professional sports teams dedicate an entire day of practice to doing this.
Even us actors review our performances and try to improve them for the next role.
However, as actors, we have performances to get through before we get to hit the field so to speak. We have to get through the audition process before getting the role, and this performance (the audition) should be scrutinized just as much, if not more than, the performance you deliver after being cast.
Just as a tennis player or a golfer can spot how their swing might be off by just a millimeter or two by reviewing “tape”, you can do the same.
You won’t have the luxury of reviewing a taping of your audition, but you can do the next best thing. In fact, the tape itself isn’t all that important in your case because not getting booked for a role is hardly ever about whether or not you delivered the best performance of those who auditioned.
There are many, many other factors that go into the casting decision and it’s why the industry has adopted the castability index as a uniform way of screening talent. You can give your castability index a boost quickly and easily here.
Some of this is out of your control but most of it is within your reach. Sometimes a character is built in one way but ends up going through development and ends up being an entirely different character type by the time casting is done.
That’s what makes things so tricky for actors.
We often don’t know whether it was a subpar performance that kept us from being booked, a change in production scheduling and availability, a change in the character avatar, etc.
Since we don’t usually get feedback on this, it’s up to us to give ourselves the feedback.
See, you can easily increase your callback ratio and booking percentage if you simply double down on the things you are doing right.
We get so caught up in our craft and constantly work on sharpening our acting skills, but that is seldom the problem with not booking enough work.
What you should be doing is evaluating every single audition you go on. Come up with a set of criteria and rate yourself from 1-5.
Rate your interaction with the CD, your performance itself, your fit for the role you are auditioning for, etc.
Also leave an open space for you to summarize how the audition went. I suggest you type this up and make several copies. Keep them in a binder and bring that binder with you every time you audition.
As soon as you can, after you have finished reading, pull out your binder and fill out your self evaluation form. Rate each category from 1-5 but try not to use 3. It’s kind of noncommittal. It’s in between good and not so good but not enough of either to provide the data you need.
Over time you will be able to file these forms into “booked” and “not booked” sections and review the reasons behind the casting decisions.
Maybe you are finding that you are doing quite well on everything but you’re just not reading for the right roles. You can go to your agent armed with that information and pursue roles that are a better fit.
The opposite could be true. You could be reading for roles that you are a perfect fit for but your performance is a bit one dimensional. If that’s the case you know what to work on.
It might even just come down to you not having chemistry with the CDs you are reading for. This is so common. It’s nerve wracking enough to be in an audition setting and trying to make a good impression can easily come off as being ingenuine.
But, if that’s what’s keeping you from being booked, you can work on it and learn a few things about connecting with CDs (you can find several articles about this here at BoostMyStar).
The bottom line is that you will know, through having collected real data in the moment, and then matching that data to whether or not you got the desired outcome (booked or not booked) what to work on.
You will know when you leave the audition whether or not you should expect a callback or whether you should get on the phone with your agent and ask them to find something else.
This exercise is super powerful and so simple to do! Use it on your next audition and on every audition from now on.
That brings us to the next point of how to generate auditions.
Most actors depend on agents and managers to do this for them, but it should be a joint effort at least. Even elite agents are not miracle workers that can pull auditions out of thin air.
You have to give them powerful tools to work with. This is one of the most effective ones.
It’s also part of your castability index, as it’s used to measure your credibility in the industry.
Reputation is everything in this business and if your reputation doesn’t match your goals, your road to success will be much longer and tougher than it needs to be.
So give yourself a leg up on the competition by using what I put together for you.
Commit to doing what we talked about in this report and check back in with me in a few weeks. I want to know how things are going for you and what’s changed, after you implement this. I’m always here to help if you get stuck along the way too, because my goal is to…
See you at the top,
Scott