Actor Growth

Happy Remembrance Day everyone. Over the past few days I was thinking how one thing that I need to do is to re-evaluate people’s first impression of me for casting purposes. Essentially, as an actor you are heavily pre-judged by what your headshot looks like as well as your appearance when you walk into the audition room.

I have heard that what some actors do is go up to complete strangers and simply ask them questions such as what kind of profession they are in. For example, some people might label one guy as a lawyer because of the suit they are wearing and another person might be stereotyped as a basketball player because they are so tall.

This is kind of hard to do with your friends and family since they know you quite well and therefore will already have a reservation about what to label you as considering they know your personality. I was thinking, maybe a funny way to do this is to go to like a speed dating event which would get rid of the awkwardness of just asking a complete stranger off the street.

Okay, this is interesting. I got the sides for tomorrow’s audition class. The side looks like it is going to be heavily dependent on the actor being able to pull off reactions as well as establishing the surrounding. The tricky thing is that in this scene a large part of it is like when you hear what the characters are thinking in their head.

Hence, it can be like a guy and a girl on a date and while watching the show you hear their thoughts on how they feel so nervous. Now in this case the sides explicitly say that the actor should read the voice overs as well and there is a lot of action in it.

I’m just thinking, how the heck do you pull this off? Like in the dating scene scenario, wouldn’t that look kind of silly in context of what is going on? One thing is for sure, I am glad I am doing this in the audition class as I have never seen a request like this and it is better to make the mistakes in class.

So technically after today the next class would be my seventh making this the longest workshop program I have taken so far apart from the full time film acting program I took in the past. I guess that is a good sign thus far if I am continuing to stay this long.

Today I did a scene from the movie “He’s Just Not That Into You”. I never seen it myself, so in that sense it was good as I was able to try and interpret everything on my own first without bias. For those who have seen the movie, it was a bar scene between a character named Alex and Gigi where Alex was talking about how men don’t call women back.

My initial interpretation was that these two only knew each other from the bar where Alex works and Gigi was like a customer. My decision was to play the character as a blunt tough love type of approach where everything was extremely directly when he was giving out his secrets about men in general as if he was talking to a friend.

As I anticipated, this got a lot of laughs since it was so blunt and direct as it is something that you wouldn’t really expect. The coach then wanted me to go in a different direction where instead the Alex character actually liked the character in a potential relationship way which in hence would turn the whole thing to be more sympathetic.

Now what caught my attention was that he mentioned the first way that I chose to go with doesn’t make the audience fall in love with me whereas that would. That was kind of interesting in the sense that in film in general it’s always about connecting with the audience where they care about the character to want to listen to what they have to say or to be rooting for them.

I guess the conflicting thing in my mind was that this was an audition style and so it should have been more about doing it with my interpretation to stand out. However, I took the direction and did it the way the coach suggested. At the end he seemed very happy about it and started to say how that is indeed the type of character people would fall for.

He then made a comment too that anyone could do the scene the way I did it in the first take, but this second approach isn’t the same story and it would definitely stand out. It was all interesting to think about. The funny thing for me I thought afterwards was that serious and dramatic style roles are a lot easier for me than comedy I think.

As well, I guess the new thing that comes to my head is once again that balance. Example, when to use a comedic approach and when to use a serious approach in terms of increasing your chances for success at an audition? Like in this example, I could easily see two different directors having two completely different perspectives/opinions.

Today in the audition workshop it was more or less similar to last week except this week there were a total of three males including myself. The regular acting coach was still on set filming that new movie “The Stranger” that has the former wrestler Stone Cold Steve Austin in it. Must be fun I thought. Similar with last week we got the same acting coach though and it is nice to get feedbacks and directions from different people as it is a great way to learn.

One really interesting technique about the whole audition process that I learned today was that you should map out your plan as to how you are going to physically position yourself and the room for the audition. Many times we are so focused in trying to understand the script and our lines where we completely forget about planning the logistics on how to best present it.

The thing is, an audition is not like a movie where all of the camera angles or say set decorations are done for you. For the most part, it is you in this blue room with a chair, a reader, the casting director and a cameraman. So with that you should plan ahead of time on where you are going to sit/stand, the direction you will be facing, how to best use the room as an eye line, etc. This will help to prevent any surprises where you have to completely improvise everything on the spot.

The coach made a comment in the end how I seem to have this really good energy about me and that I will probably land a lot of roles. The first thing that this made me think of was I think for the most part I’m not exactly getting in front of casting directors enough to get my name/face out there effectively as I seem to be doing it all by myself. So maybe when the original coach comes back I can have that sit down with him to receive some business tips about the industry as similar to what I said in my other posts I am seriously contemplating about my representation.

Last week there was no class as the coach was unavailable. This week he was working on a film set and so one of the other coaches came in to teach the session. This was a new month too and everyone in there was different aside from myself today. Some of them came from the other workshop classes.

Today was the first day where everyone literally did the same scene as we auditioned it with our own interpretation and style. Like an audition, we were sent out of the room and were called in one by one. It was a really interesting experience for me as although the coach mentioned that I made very strong choices, in the end we all as a class really tried to dissect the audition side even further to see if the choices we made were the best for this scene.

It was amazing on how much information about the story you can get from every little word of the script. While I originally interpreted it with a more serious tone, there were so many elements of the character that you are speaking to which was revealed by reading the sides more thoroughly.

Many times when you get a side the production crosses out dialogue from a script that doesn’t relate to you specifically. Example, imagine on the page there is a fight scene and your character is talking to another character. However, just before that the scene is crossed off as they want to see how you handle this scene specifically.

Now what most people would do is just read the checked off portion of the script and work on that for the audition. So your mindset in reading the dialogue would be something like “Okay, these two want to tear each other apart as they are like mortal enemies”. However, reading the crossed off sections before can give you so much hint about the back story.

Example, it could be that the scene that was crossed out was a daydream sequence where these two characters were kids and were like best friends. Reading that and knowing that fact can have such a profound difference on how you present the scene. So before when you read a line that said something like “I’m here to fight you” you might think that is in a violent way. However, knowing that back story could make you play it in a resentful way instead. That is a big difference.

Interesting session this was.

I got a call from my agent today who asked if I had access to a camcorder as he was thinking of submitting me for a project that requested that candidates be pre-screen by doing a self taped audition. Basically, as the name implies you are basically taping yourself as if you were in the audition.

This isn’t the time to try and play out the scene in a classroom way where you have a scene partner with some getups as the footage has to be focused on you primarily like an audition. Unfortunately, he didn’t actually tell me which project it was for and when he would get the sides.

Another interesting thing was that my acting coach phoned me too beforehand as I requested for a sit-down awhile back just to go over some of my career goals and hurdles. When I mentioned this, it sounded like a perfect opportunity to get some coaching to create a better taped audition.

I never actually done this before and so it will be an interesting experience.