Self-awareness and self-exploration play a pretty important role in how to progress as an actor. They should, anyway, but it’s pretty surprising how few actors have a grasp on that concept. Instead, many enter the industry without any understanding of what casting directors really want. This seriously hurts how actors get more work.
One of the keys to finding and consistently landing gigs is to have a brand, one that’s clear and specific to you. But there’s much more to brands than outward appearance; if anything, that’s the least important part. Effective branding comes down to understanding who you truly are, deep down.
That’s not to say who you are now is going to determine what you do for the rest of your life. That’s determined by who you want to become, the 2.0 version of yourself, so to speak. You can’t know who you want to be and where you want to go if you don’t know who you are now and where you come from.
Hidden In Plain Sight
Your identity, who you are deep down, needs to inform the characters you create for yourself and the roles you audition for. It helps your talent agent find better work for you too, because they know where you’ll fit in best. The roles you take on influence how people see you, and the type of actor they understand you to be. If you’re doing a little bit of everything, nothing about you is going to stand out because you’re not giving them something to latch onto. In other words, you’re forgettable.
Like I mentioned earlier, actors don’t seem to understand what casting directors are actually looking for. Actors tend to show how well they can impersonate or embody an A-lister, or they go into an audition with a preconceived idea of what people are looking for. They don’t put any thought into their performance, they imitate.
So what are casting directors looking for? The answer is simple- authenticity. Nothing resonates better with an audience, leaves a stronger impression on a casting director, and makes you memorable.
Authenticity often goes hand-in-hand with creativity. Here’s what I mean. A few years back I put out a casting call for a stereotypical ditzy Valley Girl. We ended up choosing a Japanese actress who leaned into the stereotypical Japanese schoolgirl act. Not even close to what we were asking for, but it was exactly what we were looking for. It had nothing to do with appearance or ethnicity, it was the way that this actress used her identity and lived experiences to put a creative twist on the character while staying true to the essence of the character.
The Unhappy Actor Lifestyle
These types of roles will also come more naturally to you. Your way of life, values, the things you love, and relationships in your personal life are all assets that you can lean into. You can bring those characters to life with ease.
That said, figuring out who you are can be an emotional experience, for better and for worse. You might find yourself confronting memories or feelings that you haven’t made peace with yet. But you can’t let that scare you off because those things can seriously hold you back in every aspect of your life, not just your career as an independent working actor.
And here’s the alternative- you put on an act even when the cameras aren’t rolling. You’re forced to stick to that persona, one that doesn’t reflect who you really are. It’s what people want to see from you, it’s what they love about you. It’s what everyone expects from you, so you wear a mask for the duration of your career. Change it up too much and you hurt your image. Keep up the act and you’ll be so exhausted that you resent your career.
Independent Actors Thrive on Self-Awareness
That sounds pretty intense, I know, and perhaps even a little intimidating. The truth can be scary sometimes, but an authentic brand is about much more than serving your career. It serves you as a person too.
Look at it this way- customer service workers need to bend over backwards to please angry customers even when they’re wrong. Call center reps have to follow a generic script to force a conversation with people who are quick to yell at them. ‘Service with a smile’, right? You’ve probably had at least one manager or supervisor tell you something like ‘Leave your personal problems at the door’.
When you work under someone else, your feelings aren’t exactly a priority. When you’re driven by the desire for financial and creative independence, you’re creating a career on your own terms. Being an independent actor means you’re in it for you, and no one else. The only way to make that work is by understanding who you are and staying true to it.
Stay Honest
One of the most misused acting tips people hear is ‘fake it until you make it’. There are ways to do this correctly, but that’s a story for another day. Sure, you can act a little more confidently and bolder than you normally would, but it’s very easy to misinterpret these words as meaning ‘achieve stardom by being someone you’re not’. Like any achievement in life, it should be done with honest effort. Except in this case it’s not like cheating on a test. The only person getting cheated here is you.
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