Why Actors Need Websites – 6 Money Saving Tips

Imagine this: You are in your car (or walking to the subway) and you suddenly get a call from a casting director. They are interested in submitting you for an upcoming project, but need to forward your headshot & resume to the director within the next 30 minutes. You’re not at your computer, so you cannot email your materials to them. And you’re nowhere near their office, so you cannot just drop by with a physical copy of your headshot/resume. What can you do?

Or, imagine this: You are networking at an event (like the Tribeca Film Festival) and you have met so many people that you have handed out your last copy of your reel. You run into an agent who has seen you on stage, but comments that he would like to see your film work. He asks if you have a reel to give him. Sadly, you don’t, and it will be at least a week until you can get more duplicates made. What now?

If you are a business-minded actor, you would have a website and neither case would have been a problem! You could simply tell the casting director, “Drop by my website, where you can download a copy of my headshot and resume, both formatted for printing.” And for the agent, you would be able to say, “Here’s my website. Not only do I have my reel posted, but I also have clips from a few of the other projects I have done, including some singing and a few commercials.”

Having a website is one of the most important promotional tools an actor can have, second only to a good headshot. A website allows you to provide interested parties with a more full look at your body of work, your personality, and the way you run your business. And it allows them to do it in their own time, at their pace and leisure, which is vitally important in the larger, more competitive markets. The easier you can make it for a CD/agent to get to know you, the better chance you have of making an impact with them.

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How To Feel Confident And Give Great Auditions

HOW TO GIVE GREAT AUDITIONS BY CHANGING YOUR FOCUS!

Hello fellow actors!

I’m thrilled to be able to share my years of experience as an on-set and stage actor and over 15 years of teaching and coaching actors. Some of the topics I’d like to cover include; how to have sexual chemistry at auditions and on set, the secret to playing bad guys, cops, lawyers, FBI, judges and prostitutes; how to break down audition scripts; how to get more depth and vulnerability as an actor and much, much more!

For my first column I’d like to address:

How to feel confident and have a great time at your auditions.
The incredible technique I’m going to share with you is based on the work of Jerry  and Esther Hicks, who introduced the secrets of the law of attraction years before the huge success of the video and book, The Secret.

According to Esther and Jerry Hicks we are always either focusing on what we want or what we don’t want. When you’re unhappy, nervous, angry, etc it’s usually because you are focusing on what you don’t want. “I don’t want to be lonely, I don’t want to have so few auditions, I don’t want to be poor”, etc. The secret to shifting your mood in general and specifically when you audition is to focus on what you do want and how you DO want to FEEL at your auditions and on set.

So here’s a simple process for preparing for an audition:

First, imagine yourself on the way to an audition for a part you really want. try to focus on how you are feeling.

FOCUS ON HOW YOU ARE FEELING
Usually if you’re honest, you’ll say, for example…I feel nervous, I feel excited. I feel anxious. I feel like I’m not even right for this role. I feel unprepared, etc.

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Top 11 Reputable Casting Websites

One of the things that can get me incensed as a career coach is when casting websites pop up promising to give actors access to stardom. Some sites make it sounds like an actor’s big break is just around the corner, and all they need to do is pay a fee and they’re in! But most actors know that success comes with good training, strong relationship building, and the ability & wherewithal to seize an opportunity when it presents itself (also known as tenacity.) The trouble is, even the smartest actor has heard at least one rags-to-riches story, and the allure of a quick win sometimes overshadows common sense.

So, to combat the many unscrupulous characters baiting actors with empty promises, below you’ll find are 11 of my favorite reputable websites where casting notices can be found.

Actors Access
Backstage
Actors Equity Casting Call
Playbill
SAG Indie
Now Casting
Casting Networks/LACasting.com
Casting Networks/NYCasting.com
NYCastings.com
Mandy.com
Craigslist

Any of the others not listed here typically have the same notices that are on the above sites. If you are in LA or NY, I would caution you if paying to use any website other than these listed- it probably wouldn’t be worth the money. Of course, there are exceptions and I am sure a new website will come along and blow away the competition. But as of now, the above sites are the most reputable for those in the major markets.

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January Jones on life before “Mad Men”, Betty Draper and why you should not listen to Ashton Kutcher

From GQ:

On her career before Mad Men:

‘[With modeling] You’re like an object. They move you around. And I felt like, God, I’m miserable. I hate modeling,” she says. “When I moved back to New York, the agency said I owed them $20,000. So I left the agency and then—very quickly—decided to go to L.A. and try acting. Without any training.”

It did not go well. Jones would go to auditions and just emote, channeling whatever feelings she could muster from her real life—loneliness, anger, heartache—into the character she’d been asked to read. “I felt really vulnerable,” she says. “Like, why do these people deserve to see me have these emotions for five minutes and then tell me that I’m bad at it?”

But eventually, through audition after audition, she learned not just to feel vulnerable but to play it. “January has an athletic intensity to her acting, a very instinctive kind of immediacy,” says Mad Men creator Matt Weiner, who wrote modeling into Betty’s backstory during the show’s first season. “She found a way to make Betty’s lack of self-awareness so believable by bringing in this mix of hardness and childishness, which she saw Betty having—this ability to want something, and go for it in an almost childish way.”

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Kali Hawk is on fire! How she built a career from a one-line audition

From Movieline:

You’ve really built a career out of improv, whether it’s these last two movies you booked or “Lovers & Haters,” the Mariah Carey short film you starred in that Spike Lee directed. Is there a throughline between all those projects?
I guess it really sort of started with the Spike Lee thing. That character had a line or two and once I got cast, I did the table read and Spike started taking lines from other people and giving them to my character. So that part was a small part that got made bigger, and then I got Couples Retreat down the line, and you know how you see on the poster, how I’m on it and my name is big? For most people, that billing was in their contract. My character started out so small and I had such a small agent at the time that I didn’t really have any negotiating power. After I got the movie and they saw what I could do, Vince [Vaughn] would actually write more scenes for me to do while we were shooting it, so getting on the poster and getting that star billing, that came later and that came from Vince, one of the producers on it.

Get Him to the Greek, that was a one-line part where, even though I’d just done Couples Retreat, I wanted to do this movie because it’s Judd Apatow and I want to work with those guys. I’d be a craft services person to get close to them, like, Judd knows talent and if he likes me, then maybe there’s something that he could do. And then I got that part and my one-line character got expanded to where they would just put me into stuff. It’s partly because of that movie that I moved to UTA; my agent started taking notice after I got Couples, but Judd is at UTA, and once a guy like that and everyone else associated with that movie started saying good things about me, that definitely helped the agency really like me.

So it’s weird! You go in for these small things, but they can be made bigger if you’re open to just giving them all you have. I feel like people respect that ultimately, and they do reward you for it.

What kind of new things did you bring to Trudy in Couples Retreat that may not have been on the page?
Well, I know that when I read it, it was kind of written in this standard urban girl way. You’d read it and you’d get a sense of how they would want it done, but I imagine the breakdown for it was that she’s urban, sexy, sassy…I love when they put “urban” in there. They’re getting so specific in a very generic way.

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Daniel Brühl on being nervous, auditioning for Quentin Tarantino and more!

From Movieline:
It’s not going to be apparent to anyone who goes to see Inglourious Basterds, but you actually speak fluent English. Why don’t you do more American films?
Actually, it makes sense for me to stay in Europe, as I very much consider myself a European actor — also, I’m half-Spanish, and over the last few years I’ve tried to get into the Spanish cinema. So I stay here because the offers that I get for bigger parts came from Europe, not the U.S, but I’m always open to the idea. In the case of Inglourious Basterds, it just made total sense to be in it. I found it to be a very good idea of Quentin’s to choose German and French actors to play these European parts. As I said, though, I’m open to any good project, no matter where it comes from.

Was Quentin already familiar with you and your work?
Well, I was very happy to know that he enjoyed Good Bye Lenin! so much. I think it’s one of his favorite German movies of the past few years, and he said that to him, it was the kind of movie that’s started a renaissance of new German cinema. He was also in the jury at Cannes when we showed The Edukators in competition, which I think he also liked. I think he was very clear on certain parts. It had never happened to me before that I got a call on the same day as the audition of the director offering me the part, so I was very thankful that he didn’t let me wait and make me too nervous.
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Rachel McAdams on auditioning and watching her films

Rachel McAdams isn’t a big fan of auditioning for romantic films:
“The weirdest thing I’ve had to do in an audition was making out with strangers. It was weird just turning up and kissing someone. I guess it was to see if there was any chemistry there. But the one I’m thinking of I got the part!”

What does she think about her finished films?
“I wish I could just step back and watch a film I’m in and be carried away. But what I see on the screen never encapsulates the experience – that hour and a half never sums up the shooting of it and the relationships you made and the trials and tribulations. So I always am left with a sense of longing. I’m always happy with what’s there and I’m so excited when it all comes together. But it’s never representative of the whole package.”

Edward Norton talks about auditioning for "Primal Fear"