None of this advice is ours and the page says whose it is. Every point below comes from a video indexed on Acting Craft, our free searchable library of acting advice on YouTube. Each links to the video it came from, so you can watch the person say it. We chose which nineteen videos to pull from and what order to put them in. That is the whole of our contribution.
The self tape is not covered here. It has a guide of its own with the lighting, the frame, the sound and the slate. This page is about the material and the room.
Read more than the sides
The breakdown is cliff notes, not the script. Casting director Marci Liroff calls working only from it, trying to reverse engineer what the room wants, forcing a round peg into a square hole. The alternative is unglamorous: read it, break it down, and build a person out of it. Source.
One line still means reading the whole script. If it is available to you, read it. You cannot tell the tone of a piece from a single line, and the tone is what tells you how to play it. Source. Every coach on a pilot season panel said the same, and added: read it like a detective, for the given circumstances specifically. Anything you miss is something actable you have thrown away. If the script is not in your inbox, go and find it. Source.
Research who is making it. Who is producing, who is directing, what they have made before, and what that suggests they want. It shapes what you do in the room, and doing it visibly marks you as a professional. Source.
Date the world from throwaway references. In one worked example, a cigar, film canisters and a passing mention of the Wizard of Oz place a scene around 1937 to 1942. That changes the stakes completely: half a million dollars is a bad day in a modern film budget and an unrecoverable fortune in that one. Source.
Stage directions tell you what to do before you hit frame. In the same scene, "clean out your ears" proves the character has been shouting across the lot for a while before anyone hears him. You can be yelling for fifteen feet off camera. "Walk with me" is not aimless either: he is steering the other man toward the car, and he knew that the whole time. Source.
Ellipses mark a story the character was ready to keep telling. Every place the text trails off is a place he had more to say and got cut off. Know the rest of each one. It changes how you enter the line and how you absorb being interrupted. Source.
Even the redacted parts are evidence. Blacked out portions are not what you read for casting, but they are fair game as clues. Reading past the marked start point in that example revealed a character's world described as turning "right side up," which proves the opposite was true until then. Source.
Build the person, then put them in the scene
In that order, and the order is the point. Read the sides once, then read the script, then come back. The scene looks different the second time because you now know who is in it. Working outward from the scene instead is how actors end up playing the idea of a story rather than a person in one. Source.
Want, obstacle, action. Larry Moss puts it flatly: every script, without exception, is somebody walking in with a want and trying to get it. What is in the way, and what do you do to get past it. His homework is to carry a notebook for a day and mark down every way you personally tried to get what you wanted. Source.
One objective can run an entire character. Blanche DuBois is trying to find a safe place. Once you have that, every scene she is in becomes readable, because flirting, demanding, begging and toying are the same want wearing different clothes. Source.
You cannot play a person without their social and economic facts. Moss learned from Stella Adler that you have to understand the Civil War to play Tennessee Williams's Southern women, who were raised to be hostesses and left with no way to live once that world ended. Education, money and upbringing are not background color. They are the character. Source.
Work out the character's function in the story. In the worked example the man who arrives from nowhere to rescue a finished hero is a machine of the gods, so nothing in the scene can affect him. He is a steamroller. Knowing that gives you enormous freedom in how you play him, as long as the choices still serve the text. Source.
An imagined event works as well as a real memory. Moss carries a real one, a dog he watched die when he was ten, and built an entirely invented one for a part needing a protective rage he had never felt. What matters is that it is specific and sensory: the room, the smell, the sound, the weight of a hand. Source.
And there is an argument for avoiding your own material entirely. If you draw on something you survived, part of your brain already knows everyone made it out. Characters do not have hindsight. Building the world from the script's own clues keeps you inside the emergency instead of remembering it. Source.
The conflict, and the room it happens in
Decide where you were headed before the scene started. Where are you coming from, what did you just do, and where do you need to get to by the time it ends. Those two points bracket everything you play in between. Source.
Then treat the scene as an interruption of your day. Without it you would simply have gone from point A to point B, and that is not interesting to watch. Naming exactly what got interrupted gives the scene an urgency you can act on. Source.
If you cannot find the conflict, you may be the conflict. When the obstacle is not obvious, flip the scene and read it from the other character's side. You may be the reason they cannot get what they want. Source.
Ask why the writer chose these three minutes. They skipped the thirty seconds before and the ten minutes after and picked this moment for a reason. That reason is the conflict, and the point is to watch you solve it. Source.
Know the laboratory from the library. A general setting is not enough. Place yourself precisely: the tall metal stool, the desk in front of you, two stools ahead, the teacher at the dry erase board, the windows with the blinds half drawn, the door in that corner. Vagueness about where you are flattens the story, and it is one of the failures seen most often on tape. Source.
Because physical detail changes what your body does. Knowing you are on the second floor means a noise below takes real craning to see, which is a different story from a glance toward a sound. Knowing exactly where the teacher stands, and that you want to reach the person beside you without being heard, creates two entirely different eye lines. Source.
Locking eyes with the reader is only half the battle. Real conversation splits your attention with the room: roughly half on the other person, and half glancing at the floor, up at a clock, or toward a sound outside the window. Sustained eye contact is a specific choice for a scene where the tension needs to boil, not the default. Source.
Watch the finished scene play in your head first. Run it as if it were airing, final edit included. See what everyone is wearing, how tall they are, their mood. One pass fills in the wall color, the papers on the desk and the gerbil on its wheel behind you. Expect the real set to contradict all of it, and respond to what is actually there when it does. Source.
The lines mean something else
A child at a hundred yards knows the surface meaning. If "I need to talk to you" only means that, you have added nothing. It could be "I am sorry about yesterday," or "I want to talk to you more than anyone in the world," or "I will tell you a really funny thing." The words do not change. What is behind them does, and that is your choice. Source.
Run the options on a single line. When Skyler White says "I want a divorce," does it mean "I love you still," "I am thinking of another man," "I want to kill you," or "I want to kill myself"? Test the possibilities and pick one, rather than leaving the line flat. And do not expect a director to do this for you. Source.
Read it as if the character has said all this before. Go through imagining every one of these lines has already been said to somebody else, then ask why it is different this time. Source.
Two lines with the same opening are usually one thought. "I wanted to tell you something" and "got to ask you a question" signal a man building to a single point, not two anecdotes. Reading them as connected forces you to find what links them, and that link becomes the spine of the scene. Source.
Emotion is a symptom of an obstacle, not something you play. A scene that calls for tears is a trap. Rather than manufacturing the feeling, establish that the character has nowhere left to go: he mortgaged the house, spent six months writing, and it all burned. Build the dead end and the emotion arrives on its own. Source.
Off book, and whether to write on the page
Be off book. Turning up not knowing the sides is one of the more baffling things casting sees, and it happens constantly. It is not a small excusable thing. It says you did not prepare. Source.
The coaches disagree about that, and the disagreement is the lesson. One says memorize it and get good at memorizing, because holding the script drops your confidence. Another teaches working off the page precisely because four sides arrive at midnight. The resolution offered on stage: you need both. Off book for a test you have had three weeks for, fluent with paper in hand for the one you got last night. Used properly the paper is part of the behavior and nobody notices it. Used badly it announces that you are reading, which is why so many people simply tell you to memorize. Source.
A soap director wants the script marked up, not pristine. A clean, crisp page signals you have not done anything with the text. Bring pages that are crumpled, highlighted and covered in notes, so it is obvious the script has been in your hand and worked. Source.
The opposite case, argued just as hard. Script marking is a theater habit: you rehearse Monday and return Friday, so the margin acts as a diary. Film and television have no such gap. Worse, the more you write the more you imprint the physical page, until you are picturing your own handwriting instead of listening to your partner. Say the beat work out loud to your scene partner instead, because a spoken backstory becomes a memory you can play. Source.
The one mark worth making is the trigger word. Circle the word in the other person's lines that makes you perk up and want to speak. In real conversation a single word sets off your thought mid-sentence and you wait for them to finish. Source.
Make a choice, then push past it
Your first good idea is everyone else's first good idea. Most actors prep by taking the first strong choice that occurs to them. Every other actor reading for the role landed on something startlingly similar. Push past it, then push again. The choice that books is usually found beyond the push. Source.
Across a month of auditions, almost everybody reads the breakdown literally. Liroff says the one who does something unexpected is the one who gets remembered, because they have shown the room something about the character it had not thought of. Source.
A confident wrong choice still gets you remembered. A casting director watching a specific, committed read thinks that is a really good actor and files you for the next project. An unsure, unspecific read gets you nothing at all. Source.
One actor's coach told him to do a 360 spin and a little dance on a specific line. For a Power Rangers audition. He thought it was too out there and did it anyway. The casting director broke protocol to say he was too tall at 6 foot 2, and that the spin and his personality made it an amazing job. Source.
Stop imitating the leading man you are not. Karim Diane spent his early years carrying himself and speaking like Michael B. Jordan, and his coach kept stopping him mid-audition to say drop the voice, drop the posture, do it as yourself. He says he did not start booking until he took that advice. Now he looks for one moment in the opening five seconds to show a flash of personality: a changed word, an expression, something small. Source.
Read the breakdown before you dilute yourself. Diane checks whether it actually specifies a particular kind of person. If it does not, he brings his own voice and rhythm in full. Work out honestly what percentage of yourself the role can take, commit to that, and walk in confident rather than hedged. Source.
Embrace the look you have. Liroff: you do not control your genetics, and there are thousands of conventionally beautiful people already. What gets remembered is whatever is specific to you. Chasing whichever type is in demand is a race with no finish, and most scripts are full of character roles rather than leads. Source.
The clunky moment you barrel through is the one they notice. That line you cringe at and rush past is exactly what a casting director is trained to catch. Give it extra attention in prep. And when a beat refuses to work, the problem is usually the transition into it rather than the beat itself. Fix the handoff and it tends to smooth out, sometimes into the strongest moment in the scene. Source.
What to wear
The casting brief binds you, the script does not. A dress note from casting is an instruction, and ignoring it reads as disrespect before you have said a word. Wardrobe described in the script matters far less than actors assume. If your brief says nothing, ask your agent anyway: instructions do not always survive the trip. Source.
Suggest the character, do not costume it. A queen means a nice dress, not a gown and a crown. A cop means a navy fitted shirt, no badge. Casting can use their imagination. Dress the facts instead: age, profession, whether they are a parent, and any adjective the breakdown uses. Source.
Keep pattern away from your face, and camera test it on your phone. A clean block color up top does the work. What a mirror shows and what a lens shows are different, and the difference tends to be unflattering in ways you cannot predict. Thirty seconds of footage of yourself moving will settle it. Assume the jacket comes off, so whatever is under it has to work on its own. Source.
Do not buy an outfit for a first round. Borrow it, or spend a little on one cheap accessory. A final camera test with a specific request is a fair investment. A first audition is not, and that money is better in classes or headshots. Source.
No perfume, ever. It can only hurt you. Agents, casting directors and everyone in the waiting room dislike it, and people underestimate how strong their own spritz is. One commercial agency has a sign on the door asking people not to wear fragrance because staff are allergic. Source.
In the room
Never open with a disclaimer. Saying you are bad at auditions, or wrong for the part, hands the room the only thing it will remember about you. You have described yourself as the wrong choice and then asked them to disagree. Source.
Apply the job interview test. Before you say or ask anything, check whether you would do it at any other job interview. Asking to borrow a stapler, or which resume they want, fails that test and lands exactly as it would anywhere else. Source.
Never offer your hand, and leave your bags outside. If a director stands up to shake your hand, shake it, but do not make the first move. Ask whether they want your picture and resume, say hi, go to your mark. Leave the purse, the gym bag and the change of shoes in the waiting room. Twenty minutes early is fine, an hour is not, and if you are running late, call ahead. Source.
Your sides are the gun, the bat and the slap. No props, with rare exceptions like a water bottle for a drinking scene. Rolled up sides stand in for almost anything and you can hit them hard instead of a person. If a real phone is in the scene, turn it off completely so the screen never lights up. Source.
How you recover matters more than the stumble. An audition is watched the way a tightrope walk is: the room wants you to make it. Dissolving into apology makes producers wonder what you would be like on the day. Say you are starting again and start, or take a beat, find your place and carry on. Do not apologize for a flubbed line or a choice you are unsure of. Source.
Do not ask whether there is anything they want to see. It reads as work you did not do. Nobody is withholding a secret, but fifty people cannot each be briefed, and a room that told everyone exactly what to do would learn nothing about anyone. Show them something first, and then they will direct you. Source.
Only ask a question you actually need answered. Casting will usually offer, and people often raise a hand just to be noticed. Ask only if the answer makes the scene fall into place. Small talk carries the same risk: one actor had feedback passed to their agent that they were too chatty. If the scene is emotional, offer to chat afterward. Source.
Try the adjustment, do not defend the choice. When they say they liked it and now want it another way, they already have your version on tape. Arguing costs you, because set work is all about taking direction well. Source.
Showing you are listening is playing the result. Casting directors are trained to spot the difference between listening and performing the look of listening, and they click off when they see it. Your character has thoughts while the other person speaks, not just a wait for the cue. Source.
What you do on the off-lines exposes you. A soap director's version of the same point: some actors do interesting work while they speak and go blank while listening, and that is where auditions fall down. He also needs reaction shots to cut to. An actor who reads well but does not react gives an editor nothing. Source.
Vibe matters, and it comes last. After the text work and the acting, that director wants a sense of your personality: relaxed enough to talk, professional, courteous, a bit of a laugh but not too much. Being quiet on set is fine too, as long as you come on and smash it. It is the final consideration, not the first. Source.
If you are sick, ask to self tape instead. Do not carry the flu into an audition. Asking to tape it at home earns more respect than showing up contagious. Source.
Nerves, and where your attention goes
Put your attention on the other person. The first thing Larry Moss was taught and the first thing he teaches. Watch what the other actor is actually doing, moment to moment, and self-consciousness has nowhere to live. It is not a confidence trick. It removes inhibition by occupying the attention that was producing it. Source.
You cannot think a personal thought and a character thought at once. Everything in your head at an audition, from that girl is better than me to I do not know what they want, is true and useless. The replacement is not affirmations. It is the character's actual thoughts about the actual situation, which occupy the same space and leave no room for the other. Source.
Nerves are not the problem, what you do with them is. Telling yourself you are not nervous does not work, and neither does being ashamed of it. Acknowledge them, breathe, and change the story you attach to them. Everybody at every level of this business gets nervous, so the skill is coping rather than eliminating. Source.
Breath is the door emotion comes through. Moss arrived at acting so defended that fear had become physical armor, and found that simply breathing freely started the feeling moving. Watch anyone who becomes genuinely emotional and the breath frees first. The feeling follows it. Source.
Prepare, then let the preparation go. Rehearsal and performance are different events and dragging one into the other ruins the second. Do the work, sleep, review it for five minutes in the waiting room, note your first thought at the top of the page, and release all of it. Trying mid-scene to reproduce what you found last night in the shower is what actually loses the room. Source.
Attachment to booking reads as neediness on camera. Desire to book is fine. Desperation is different, it seeps into every moment of the read including a self tape, and it usually gets filed under the catch-all note: not right for the part. Source.
The biggest mistake is cramming a career into three minutes. Sam Christensen's version: actors rarely get to act as much as they want, so the audition takes on the weight of proving everything. Shift to "can I make this story work," which is the actual job once you book it, and the burden lifts for everybody in the room. Source.
Walk in to give something, not to get something. One concrete trick offered on that panel: write yourself a check for the role, dated for the hour of the audition, so you arrive treating it as a paid gig. And a flat read from the reader is usually not a verdict. Source.
Improvising
Only when it serves the writer's scene. There is no cookie cutter rule. The test is whether your addition contradicts the clues the writer laid out. The safest places to add are the edges: the top of the scene, the final beat, or a slightly different reaction inside it. Source.
An improvised line can book the job and still cost you. One audition for a recurring role on a major show included a sprinkled in improvised line, and it booked. At the first on set rehearsal the number one on the show stopped and said do not do that, that is not okay. Months later the episode aired with the scene rewritten and the dialogue given to somebody else. Source.
Other sets build the scene out of the actors' own words. On a second recurring booking, the process was a group conversation with the writer, the director and the cast after each rehearsal, then filming with lines added to make it feel organic. Every set works differently, which is the actual lesson. Source.
And some auditions simply require it. Aaron Marcus points out that certain audition types call for improv, so it is a skill to have ready rather than one to learn on the spot. If you think of yourself as a print or commercial model only, it is not unusual to be sent to a television commercial audition, so audition craft applies to you too. Source.
What a good audition is actually for
Book the room, not the part. Liroff: the odds on any single role are close to a lottery, so aiming at it loads you with pressure over something you cannot control. Go in to make fans of everyone present instead. A room that thinks you deliver brings you back, and that is what builds a career. Source.
Which also frees you from any single audition. When every read is an opportunity to create a fan, come what may, the attachment to that one result drops away, and casting gets the space to see what you can do. Source.
The best actor does not always get the part. Roles go to whoever is both good and right: fits the project, fits the rest of the cast, and meets the non-creative requirements producers and studios have imposed, including budget, location, union status and name value. Talent sits at the top of that list. It is not the only thing on it. Source.
A no can turn into a different job later. One actor played a part so abrasively that he did not get it, and months later was remembered and written into a recurring role that suited exactly that. The business is a continuum rather than a series of separate verdicts. Source.
Casting directors train themselves to remember you. Most do not have perfect memories, but they build the habit of committing talent to memory during auditions and self tapes. The goal is not to hope they remember you. It is to give them something to attach to that memory. Source.
A grouchy casting director may still be rooting for you. Most love actors, but life bleeds into work and they can read as moody or indifferent. Sometimes that distance is self protection, because they care and will feel bad when they cannot cast you. They also want you to book it and deliver on set, so the producer calls to say what a dream you were. Source.
An unwatched self tape usually has a backstage reason. Casting works through lunches, late nights and holidays trying to watch every tape they requested, and still falls short. Often something caused it: a new draft that cut the character, or a lost location forcing them to cast tomorrow from tapes already in hand. Source.
Callbacks often cast the person, not the reading. On Clash of the Titans, director Desmond Davies did not want to hear the American leads read at all. He assumed the casting director had brought good actors, and wanted to know who he was spending a six month Mediterranean shoot with. Source.
Train the auditioning craft, not just the acting craft. They are different skills and acting alone is not what gets rewarded in this event. Source. Aaron Marcus describes his early auditions as walking in, reading and walking out with nothing planned for before or during, and credits his booking record to deciding to study rather than keep guessing. Source.
When the audition itself is the problem
Ask what the audition is for before you drive. One actor took a call saying they loved her headshot and wanted to audition her, never asked what the project was, and arrived at a sales pitch. Ask for the project, the character, the sides and the casting director's name, then search all of it before you get in the car. Source.
A teardown followed by an offer is the scam. They attacked her headshot and resume, told her she looked like Zendaya and could be a millionaire with better materials, then offered a $2,000 eight week program of which one or two weeks involved actual acting. The demolition was the setup for the sale. Source.
A two hour deadline on a payment is your answer. When she asked for time to think, she was told she had two hours to sign and send a check. Legitimate training does not need your money that afternoon. Source.
If nobody with a camera has shown up, leave. A call time of 8 a.m. on a demolished street with no buildings and no signs, and by 8:20 the only messages were running late, bringing snacks, stay put. She gave it thirty minutes and drove off. Other actors were still standing on the corner. Source.
Do not follow a stranger away from the address. A callback address turned out to be an occupied house next to an elementary school. A man appeared from a walkway, said he had rented an Airbnb and was running late, and told the actors to follow him. Others went. She refused, at the risk that the job was real. Source.
Stop typing your email into audition websites. That $2,000 pitch reached her because she had been searching for Disney auditions and handing her email and phone number to whatever came up. She now works only through Actors Access, Casting Frontier and LA Casting, and brings somebody with her when she feels unsure. Source.
And one casting director will not touch paid workshops. Liroff's objection is that no other profession asks you to pay for a job interview, and that offices claiming to cast from them are describing something illegal. The alternatives she names are theater, showcases, and making your own work with writers you already know. Source.
Watch the sources
All nineteen videos are on Acting Craft, searchable by what is actually said in them.
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Everything above is attributed and none of it is ours. The people quoted here contradict each other in two places, left in on purpose, because the disagreement is more useful than a tidy rule. If we have summarized somebody badly, tell us and we will fix it.