HOW DO I GET MORE AUDITIONS, THE ETERNAL QUESTION!
The question itself has a quantitative aspect and so one way of answering this question is by addressing purely the quantitative or mathematical concerns which affect the answer.
Here are two correlated factors that cannot be answered with any certainty:
1. How many roles appear in the breakdowns during any given month that call for my (the actor's) age and ethnicity (the most general qualification). If there are few roles there will be few or no auditions. This should be self-evident.
2. How many candidates in my age / ethnicity are submitted to casting offices for breakdowns that are published. Generally speaking you can assume that for most actors who have concerns about audition rate, this number is between 1000 and 3000. The number differs based on the scope of the casting: for Co-Star roles, primarily actors in the Los Angeles region will be submitted. For smaller Guest Stars, the candidates will also likely be only considered from the local region. Once you get into major recurring Guest Star arcs and Series Regulars, the scope of talent submissions will be global. Yesterday Natasha Ward published a breakdown in Los Angeles that had 2 Series Regular roles for female talent - to play 16. In the middle of the night, that same breakdown was published in London. Based on what Dorian Frankel said about pilot Season 2018, you should assume that Series Regular breakdowns receive around 6000 submissions per role from talent agencies around the world. "The odds are never in your favor."
These two factors above are obviously play a dominant role in determining how many auditions one might get. And unfortunately, you have no control over "what writers write" and "where projects are shooting". You can exercise some influence on the locality of casting by getting a regional talent agent in the Atlanta or London markets.
Fundamentally, this essay is about taking actions that will result in more auditions for an individual client. Since there are factors that cannot be controlled, we need to set those aside and focus only on factors that we can exert influence over.
THE BUTTER TRUTH, A DIGRESSION - I don't purchase butter very often. In fact, for more than 10 years I don't think I bought any butter or margarine products. When I added butter back into my cooking ingredients, I had very specific requirements: the product needed to be organic and "grass fed" and ideally, from a local farm in British Columbia (ie. farm-to-table). I am the purchaser and the grocery stores are the seller. Now let's look at what happens when I go grocery shopping. First of all, I avoid the major grocery stores because they usually stock very few organic products and typically no farm-to-table products. But even among the larger so-called independent or local grocery stores, the selection of butter products typically does not include any products which meet my criteria. Or if they do, it's usually only one or two. So regardless as to how many varieties of butter and margarine and whatever else is on display in the refrigerated display, my focus is on the two products which meet my a priori criteria. As far as I'm concerned the rest of the products on offer "simply do not exist". Therefore, if you want to understand how to get more auditions, it will help you most to start observing your own practices for researching, shopping and acquiring products that you, yourself use in your day-to-day life. What do you buy, why do you buy it, do you only purchase one brand and why? I think you'll discover that there are many product categories that you consume on a regular basis and your purchasing habits follow a very narrow band from the available choices. You may be loathe to understand yourself as a product, but in the world of casting, you are the product on offer and the casting director, producers/directors and network executives are the consumer. You are but one of many products available. If you want to grow your auditions you need to address these fundamental facts.
UNDERSTANDING CASTING PROCEDURES (LINK)
SPECIFICITY AND COMPETITION
If you're following this little story without any confusion it should be immediately apparent that the goal of all talent with respect to television episodic casting is to get into the "Ranked #1" group for an appropriate breakdown. In general, I do not submit my clients for roles that they are not well-suited for. I do this so that the casting office knows that I am paying attention to their concerns and not just "throwing spaghetti against the wall" to use a colorful analogy. However, CONVERSELY, we should assume that some other agents and managers are not addressing the specificity of the role and that the pool of 1000 actors actually contains a large number of candidates that "are not well-suited for the role".
I have said in the past and I'll say it again here, at this stage of casting, there are only two things that matter: “YOUR LOOK" and “YOUR CREDITS". In fact, we can write a generalized theory about these casting activities here:
"The actors with the APPROPRIATE LOOK are ranked from strongest to weakest credits; the talent with the best credits will be ranked #1 and the rest of the candidates will be ranked according to their credits."
Unfortunately, with credits we're dealing with a chicken and egg syndrome: "How do you get more credits when you need more credits to get more credits?"
The answer is VERY SIMPLE. The pure fact of the matter is that for many casting scenarios, "THE LOOK" is actually more important than the credits.
Let's go back the butter purchasing analogy. In the dairy refrigerator are 100 products on offer that vaguely could be described as butter-like or butter-substitutes. But for me, more than 90% of those products are not under consideration (disregarded) when I go shopping simply because they do not address the SPECIFICITY OF MY SEARCH. And it is further true that if the product I am searching for is NOT READILY VISIBLE IN THE DISPLAY CASE, it will not be part of my consideration. If I have time, I might ask a sales associate for help locating my specific type of butter but on a day when I am in a rush, I will assume that it’s not available.
For supporting roles calling for character actors (ie. working actors and not names), the name of the game is SPECIFICITY. And the only way we can address specificity is with A LOOK THAT DESCRIBES AN ARCHETYPE. Furthermore, the look must be EVIDENT AT THUMBNAIL RESOLUTIONS.
Far and above all other considerations, the reason that most actors do not get many auditions is for this one reason: THE HEADSHOTS ARE TOO GENERIC. They lack meaning, tone, character (read: specifics), do not serve to pre-qualify the candidate in any way, nor for any role. Such headshots do occasionally result in auditions (“a stopped clock is right twice a day”).
Generally speaking, obtaining an increasing number of auditions is addressed primarily by increasing the specificity of the headshots offered to casting for an individual actor. Specific headshots generate more auditions.
We also want those auditions to yield bookings and repeat business from the casting office. So furthermore, we want the INCREASINGLY SPECIFIC HEADSHOTS TO STRONGLY CORRELATE WITH THE STRENGTHS OF THE ACTRESS so that the casting office is pleased with having auditioned the client for the role. That reflects positively on both the talent and the talent representatives.
SOME ASSERTIONS ABOUT THESE PRINCIPLES
There are experiences that only I can have because I and I alone sit and submit to the breakdowns in a repetitive fashion, ad nauseam, year after year. For example, I can experiment with submitting a variety of talent/looks to any one role and see which actors from that group are scheduled by casting. It’s eye-opening and you will never have this experience unless you intern at a talent agency. But you don’t need to if you simply trust that what I’m telling you is a close approximation of the truth.
From my experiences and narrowing the experiences to the casting scenario that I described above, I can make the following assertions about audition rate which I believe to be true:
- The actor with the most specific headshot is most likely to get an audition.
- Within a group of actors who all have appropriate and specific headshots ("looks"), the actors with the best credits (momentum) are most likely to get an audition.
- Actors with generic headshots rarely get called in for auditions because in a group of 1000 candidates there always exists at least 30 candidates who have "the perfect look" for the role.
- Certain categories of characters (ie. desired looks) appear in the breakdowns much more frequently than other characters and therefore, if you're changing your look, you should adopt a character type that is frequently written about in American television.
Because your credits only increase when you book, the only factor that the actor controls is how good and specific the headshots are. Fundamentally this starts with the choice of hairstyle and whether or not you have a ripped physique, tattoos, piercings and so forth (body morphology). So, in this theory of "how to get more auditions", the only controllable factors are YOUR LOOK and BODY MORPHOLOGY. Both can be changed, but it is much easier to change YOUR LOOK. However, both are worth changing. If you can build a body like THE ROCK or DANI SPEEGLE, you will automatically get seen for more roles requiring those particular body types. This latter principle applies most in career changing roles like Series Regular roles or major roles in studio movies (ie. Dave Bautista in Guardians of the Galaxy).
If you already have A LOOK, you can increase your audition rate by adding additional, specific headshots to your arsenal which further qualify you for SPECIFIC TYPES OF ROLES ON SPECIFIC TYPES OF PROJECTS. Such supplementary or additional headshots should follow the guidelines of LOW STATUS-HIGH STATUS and DOPPELGANGERS (sometimes called against type casting) because there is a fundamental question in psychology which is often described as "NATURE VS. NURTURE". In other words, two people who have very similar genetics (genotype) can grow up to lead very different lives (and therefore have very different looks). You're an actor and so in theory, you can play all versions of yourself. To discover what other headshots might be useful you can use a combination of cultural research (Google image search, people watching) and systematic variation in terms of status/style. You can think of status and style as existing on a spectrum and INDIVIDUAL SPECIFIC LOOKS describing a specific location on those spectra of possibilities.
CHANGING YOUR SPECIFICITY
The most effective way to garner more auditions is by becoming more specific to roles that are typically casting. The path to greater specificity can be understood in a series of increasingly radical changes or steps:
- Rigorously plan a new headshot session making sure to cover all the territory identified in the Waddlesworth brainstorming tool "Doppelganger Compass". Select one or more photographers to secure the looks identified by the compass and get those headshots to me.
- Prior to undertaking step #1, research what changes to your personal style are going to have the greatest effect on your prospects as an actor. Meet with a personal stylist, design a new haircut / personal style cultivation which addresses the needs of your acting career. After making this stylistic change ("makeover"), undertake step #1 (get photos).
- After undertaking step #1 and step #2 further identify changes to your body morphology that will make you more desirable to casting. For example, 2/3 of all roles do not call for any kinds of physical fitness and such criteria would not come into question during those casting calls. But for the last 1/3rd, a specific fitness level might be required (ie. ultrafit or ripped or muscled). It might take as long as 2-3 years to change your physique in this manner. "No pain, no gain". In your acting career you should simultaneously work on one, three, ten and thiry year concerns. You can start preparing today for the career you will have in three years. If you wait three years to start those preparations, the goalpost is actually now six years away.
SUMMARY
I can find no evidence that increasing the rate of auditions is any more challenging than adopting a killer look, getting increasingly specific headshots in combination with increasing your training, body morphology goals and resume credits. If you already have specific headshots, then it is likely that the entirety of your future career lies in improving your auditioning skills.
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