Casting Do’s and Don’ts

I want to give you a couple of big no-no’s that we see all the time when actors walk into a casting. These are things that can absolutely just ruin your chances.

DON’T TALK NEGATIVE ABOUT THE PRODUCT

You’ve got to find a way to attach positivity to the product that you’re selling.

What do you do when you’re auditioning for something and you don’t necessarily believe in the product? You have to find a way to believe in that product. For instance, you couldn’t be trying to sell soda and then walk into the audition room and do an improv and say something like oh man drinking this soda, but it’s gonna stain my teeth hope that doesn’t happen. You’re totally not gonna get the role. The company selling the soda is not going to want to cast you. So, you have to find something positive inside the audition room.

DON’T BE NEGATIVE TO THE OTHER ACTORS

The other thing you totally don’t want to do is be negative to the other actors in the room. You want to try to lift them up. If you’re not lifting up the other person, then you don’t look good. Trust me on this. So, if you’re trying to make yourself look good and being selfish that’s never gonna work. You want to go in there with an unselfish attitude and try to make everybody else around you look good. Ideally you’re the actor that looks good no matter who they put with you, because you’re making everybody else look good. You want to walk in with that positive attitude.

LISTEN AND TAKE DIRECTION

You need to listen. You get directions from casting directors, either outside the castingroom or inside the casting room. If you have to repeat and ask again and again the same information that’s already been given to you. Then you’re leaving yourself in a situation where we can tell that you’re not direcable. We can tell that you’re somebody who doesn’t listen and can’t take direction easily. That means, our perception is going to be that you’re gonna be hard to work with once we get you on set. If you’re asking those same questions over and over again on a movie set, it’s the same thing as in the casting. You’re taking up valuable time and time is money. So, the faster you can be done as an actor and do an efficient job, the more you save the production overall.

Think about it if you can save them an hour’s worth of work, you save an hour’s worth of production, an hours worth of director, an hour’s worth of everybody on the set. That means those people doesn’t have to be there anymore. They don’t have to pay all those people because you did such a great job. This is why actors don’t get paid hourly and nor should they get paid hourly actors should be paid by what they do and how efficiently they can come across.