*Vvvt*
Phone. An email. It’s from Hatch, my agency. Subject line “Self Tape Request”. We’re on.
Quick scan through the character breakdown. Usually something about “any size”, “comedy chops” “naturally funny”. All well within my wheelhouse. It’s due in a couple of days. Alright. Let’s get it.
Open the sides.1 Three scenes across eight pages. A full half of one page is a block of text where it’s just my character talking. For some, having the script on your lap or held up is good practice, Not me. I pride myself on being off-book even at this stage. Self-imposed for sure but I think it just looks so much better on the tape. I transfer the script to some software on my iPad and start to learn the lines.
A fair chunk of time has passed. I can do all my lines, in a row, flawlessly, three times on the bounce. That’s how you know you know it.
Lights? On. Background? The only plain wall in my house wide enough to accommodate my fat head with full freedom of movement. Company? Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, my dear sweet mother reading in for all the characters that I’m not playing. She’s been all sorts. Parents, bosses, peers, heroes, villains and I’m reasonably certain she played a robot at some point. She didn’t do the voice which is fair enough. Sound? Every effort made to insulate the corner of the room I’m performing in from outside noise. We’re ready. AAAAAAAANNNNNNNND ACTION!
A fair chunk of time has passed. My perfectionism has… well not WASTED a lot of time but we had to do that half page monologue like eight times until I was happy with pace and delivery. I have four files now. A slate where I say my name and who I’m playing and the three scenes free of any mistakes with the camera angled just so to get the full effect of my fat head acting away. I send them off and wait.
And wait.
And wait.
The pencilled start date of principal photography comes and goes. Maybe there was a delay? I’ll wait.
And wait.
And wait.
The pencilled end date of principal photography comes and goes. Maybe there was a severe delay? I’ll wait.
And wait.
And wait.
Then the show comes out on BBC iPlayer/Netflix/Apple TV/Disney Plus/Paramount Plus/All4/ITVX/Amazon Prime. It reviews well. The guy who played that character, MY character, did really well.
I guess I didn’t get the part.
Old Man Yells At Cloud Section
Not to be an old man yelling at clouds but BACK IN MY DAY auditions were a place that you physically went to. Three or four times a week I would skip to the train station and ride it into the big city (London) to its glittering heart (Soho) with a head full of script and a pocket full of dreams. In some nondescript office building would be a room just like the one pictured above. The casting director would be there with an assistant working camera or reading in lines. Sometimes a producer or director would be there to help steer your performance into the shape they were looking for. It was exciting. It felt very “industry” of me to be there.
It had practical career benefits too. Despite being extremely anxious about meeting new people, I know how to perform. Once I’ve got my work hat on the usually quite shy Ethan drains away to be replaced by Ethan Lawrence: Large Actor. I am, as the saying has it, “good in the room”. And when you are “good in the room” people remember you. You start to build relationships with casting directors who will keep you in mind for projects down the line. I am not overexaggerating when I say that auditioning for a lovely casting director named Tracey Gillham (shout out to Tracey) for a lovely show for Sky Living called Trying Again in 2013 (shout out to Trying Again. You were too pure for this world) led directly to my casting in After Life as late as 2018. I owe my career to Tracey who, after seeing this earnest young man pretend to have sanitary towels under his armpits2, kept me in her back pocket for assorted comedy nonsense. When a role in a Ricky Gervais sitcom came up that featured some excellent business with some nose bound recorders she called me. The rest, including a British Comedy Award and a National Television award, is history. I didn’t win those awards by the way. The show did. After Life. I like to think I helped though.
It didn’t even matter to me then how expensive and time consuming this all was. You don’t get paid for auditions. You extremely rarely get paid for recalls. Even with my trusty rail card I was still racking up pounds just for the opportunity to be seen. I never thought about it in those terms though because I was “good in the room”. I was fostering relationships with the people I would see time and again in these rooms. I when I did land a part it was all worth it. All that effort, time, travel and grind coming to sweet fruition.
And then, inevitably, there was a global pandemic.
Another Reason Why The Novel Coronavirus Sucked
Look. I’m not a rube. It was entirely necessary for the audition process to shift to working remotely. Heck, I had my final audition for Horrible Histories on, like, the 18th of March 2020. I had to take a train into town, a tube across town, work all day in a voice over booth, go back across town, audition in a small room with five people in it and then take the tube and train home. This was FIVE DAYS before the UK locked down. How I didn’t get Super-Covid remains the great mystery of the decade.
It also makes perfect sense why there hasn’t been any rush, or any attempt at all really, to shift back to in person auditions. If the production company doesn’t have space in their offices to set a room up, one must be hired. I’ve auditioned in churches more times than I imagine you would think. All of this costs money. Like a lot of industries there is value, both monetarily and in productivity, in allowing for either fully remote or hybrid work. I get all that.
But by the same token I can’t help but feel like something has been lost. Instead of getting a chance to build those relationships, to talk to the people who are tasking you to bring the words on a page to life, to introduce your own interpretation to a text and then be directed, all we now have is a casting breakdown and a PDF. You can’t be “good in the room” anymore. There is no room. Just a blank wall that’s wide enough to fit your fat head in.
In the room, the audition process started the second you walked in the door. Who is this guy? Is he friendly and respectful? Will he be good for energy on a set? They might even hit you with a few questions about recent projects. Who have you been working with? How has it been going? This is before you even get to performing the sides. You would do your first take as you imagined the character to be based on the breakdown and your close reading of the script. You’d have the chance to talk about it with the panel auditioning you. We liked that. What made you choose to do it this way? How about if you tried this? You do your second take. If you’re a handsome professional like me you do it with all the direction you’ve just been given in place. There’s always the sense that you’re collaborating. You’re bringing your skill and talent as an actor, as an interpreter of the writer’s will made flesh, to the creative minds that will bring the whole thing to life. If you’re good in the room, that translates to a contract. To work. And even if it was a no this time, you can still walk away knowing you did your best and that it was an artistic decision to go with someone else.
With a self tape, you do your best to interpret what they want from you from a narrow set of parameters. If you’re lucky, you may be sent a complete script so you can place your character in context. For the most part, you’ll just be sent a character breakdown with sides. If the project is of a certain size or backed by a certain selection of big companies, you may not even get a character breakdown or sides. Seriously. I’ve been in a situation where I’ve signed a literal non-disclosure agreement in order to access a casting that gave me a nameless character with no description and a dummy script. From whatever you’ve been given, you must then formulate some kind of angle. All you have is what you’ve got. There is no on the fly direction. This isn’t to say I and other actors aren’t capable of acting without direction, it’s just that in this case, as well as filming, lighting and editing our tapes we also have to just kind of guess what the people holding the keys to your next job want. You learn the lines, do your research and film it all (for free, mind) before tying it all up and sending it off. To nothing. No feedback. No response. The only evidence of any kind suggesting that you aren’t just firing something into an empty void is the automated email you get saying that someone opened the wetransfer link.
So what point am I trying to make here? Good question.
The Point I Am Trying to Make Here
It should be no secret to anyone with even the vaguest knowledge about the industry that it is notoriously hard to break into. Millions of actors competing for dozens of jobs. Each audition is essentially the most high pressure job interview you have ever had and I’ll tell you something for nothing: I’ve had more unsuccessful job interviews than you’ve had hot dinners. The hit rate is so poor and the consequences for failure so dire (99% of working actors are living from cheque to cheque) it’s little wonder there’s such significant rates of burnout. At time of writing the industry is at a standstill for various reasons (not least Brexit, Cost of Living and the SAG strike) and people are having to decide whether any of this is worth the stress and insecurity.
That’s a lot of words to say that you need extremely thick skin to survive in this business and I believe it is incumbent on all of us to try and alleviate the stress and mental health burden where we can. Speaking solely about the dispassionate and dehumanising process that remote auditioning has become, here is a list of things that can be done in order of least to most likely to actually happen.
1) Pay People For Their Time
This is absolutely cloud cuckoo land thinking and I am completely aware of that. I am also aware, however, that with the work of recording, lighting and editing tapes shifted solely onto the actor auditioning, we are being asked to perform a fair amount of labour just for the opportunity of getting something in front of the gatekeepers. It doesn’t have to be much. Even just an hour’s worth of minimum wage, just to make us feel like we matter. This could be helped by my next idea:
2) Reduce the Number of “Cattle Call” Auditions
This has been a problem for as long as I’ve been auditioning and certainly long before I turned professional. I get the appeal. You make the character breakdowns as broad as possible to generate a wider pool of actors to pick from. From the other side however, walking into a room filled with people who look very similar to you, or worse, walking into a room with dozens of people who look NOTHING like you makes it feel like the net has been cast so wide and the holes in the net are so big your small fish body has no hope of being trawled and sold at auction. That metaphor got away from me. What I’m driving at is that a tighter focus on what they want for a particular role at this stage can drastically reduce the wasted time of actors who, based on what they can bring, aren’t realistically being considered anyway. I once auditioned for a role where the breakdown asked for “someone good at comedy. A Jamali Maddix type”. The role eventually went to… Jamali Maddix. I’d argue that, especially if they were paying for our time, situations like that would happen a lot less! (Jamali was fantastic in the role by the way as he always is. That’s probably why they wanted him in the first place).
3) A More Intensive Recall Process
Here we start getting to the points that I feel are not only most likely to change but NEED to change if remote auditioning is to become the new normal (remember when everyone talked about the new normal as Covid rolled on and it turned out the new normal was the same as the old normal just with loads of people getting sick? That was fun). If, moving forward, our initial auditions go out without direction or guidance, it seems only fair that the recall process is broader and more involved. It’s a great opportunity to nurture talent and help people who are new or just starting out receive professional direction and see if they can blossom under the lights. It doesn’t have to be in person either but I believe by reducing the cattle call culture and paying people (a man can dream) there would be a greater incentive to really work with the actors and really find what they want in a role. It can even be over Zoom for all I care. It would just make it feel less like screaming into a void.
4) Making It Feel Less Like Screaming Into a Void
I know I got a bit fruity earlier with my description of a self tape (putting my Creative Writing degree to good use, at last), but I’m genuinely not joking about the only real feedback to a tape being that someone opened the download link. This is probably the most demoralising and dehumanising aspect of self taping. At least if you cocked up an in person audition you did it in front of people and you knew what to avoid next time. Throwing out these tapes with no direction and subsequently getting no feedback in return means you can never improve. This is especially true for those who are just starting out in their careers. Experience is everything in this industry and if, god forbid, your only real experience of auditions is remote, I shudder to think how hard it must be to constantly run into brick walls and silence. With a more broad recall process, a reduction in cattle calls and paying people for their time (I’m going to keep banging this drum) you aren’t just pulling actors out of the isolation of remote taping but also creating more dynamic and reactive tapers. It’s an investment in the future really. The industry can only benefit from sharper and more savvy actors. Win win.
But you know what? If none of these excellent ideas (if I say so myself) are implemented I got one more for you. It’s achievable, it’s kind and I think it could really help people who struggle with how isolating and emotionally draining self taping to nothing can be. People who miss the old days where it was possible to increase your chances by being good in the room. People like me.
5) It’s a No This Time
That’s all. It could even be a template email. Just a copy and paste job. But if we are to continue throwing tapes we worked very hard on into the silent void, any form of acknowledgment or sense there is someone on the other end of that process who took the time to watch us, critique us, discuss us with each other and really consider us for the role would genuinely help. Maybe I’m just speaking for me here. I’m an old dog refusing to learn a new trick. I genuinely believe, however, that just this small tweak would make the whole process feel less antagonistic and less dehumanising. After all, we’re all ravenous attention seekers. We just want to be seen even if it is a no this time.
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“Sides” are the script, scripts or partial scripts you will be performing for the audition.
Seriously, Trying Again was such a good show. My agent Michael and I still talk about how it should have got a second series ten years on. If you haven’t seen it, seek it out. It sort of presaged the current crop of dramadies that are two a penny these days. Too pure for this damn world.
Fantastic article, again! Can you tell us more about your degree and if you'd recommend a degree of any sort (arts based ofc) to someone looking to start acting? Looking forward to the next article already! X