Acting From Square One

A young actress fresh out of college and with a few stage credits posted a question this week to a Google acting group I belong to, asking what an actor needed to do to get started from Square One in the Los Angeles film market. 

Well, being East Coast I couldn’t help with the LA part, but her question did get me thinking about what I’d learned in the two and a half years since I decided to take my career from producing/directing a political talk show for PBS (with “actors” of a somewhat different order) to working in front of the camera.

This is what I told her, and it’s probably as good a summary of my experience as I can come up with.  This is Acting from Square One:

• You need to show that you've studied acting somewhere. It doesn't necessarily have to be a four-year, degree program at a top-rated drama school. It can be workshops and seminars with respected professionals, but you need to show training, and be sure the mix includes Improv. You already have a good start, but consider training an ongoing process.  Pick up practical skills you can add to your resume, such as reading from a teleprompter, learning a dialect, firearms training, horseback riding, etc. 

• Read everything you can on acting and the business of acting.  Bonnie Gillespie's book Self Management for Actors is encyclopedic in covering the issues you need to know to build a career.  Terrific books on the craft of acting include How to Stop Acting by Harold Guskin, Acting in Film by Michael Caine. and I'll Be in My Trailer: The Creative Wars Between Directors & Actors by John Badham and Craig Modderno, to name a few. Look for Judith Searle's book Getting the Part.  It's out of print but you may be able to find a used copy on Amazon.  Also Michael Shurtleff's book Audition. 

• Look at blogs on general acting advice. One I often visit is Mark Westbrook's “The Acting Blog” at http://acting-blog.com. Westbrook is an acting coach in Glasgow, Scotland. Scan his posts. Lots of useful and insightful information there on how to approach scenes.

• Most important, grab every opportunity you can to act in speaking roles. It's all about practice, practice, practice, and finding what kind of roles are a good fit for you.  Initially that may mean getting the biggest roles you can get in very small projects, then moving up to bigger projects.

• Doing a cold read audition?  Here's some useful advice: Emphasize the verbs first, then the nouns, and let the adverbs and adjectives take care of themselves. Listen to classically trained British actors.  It's what they do typically and it adds a lot of power to your scene.

• Don't spend a lot of time doing background work or directors may start thinking of you solely as a background performer.  When you do, remember that the farther you are from the camera the more broadly animated you may need to be.  And don’t be put off by instructions not to speak to, or even look at, the leading actors.  They’re not being prima donnas. Acting isn’t easy; they’re trying to stay focused.

• If you speak on film - even one line - be sure you get the clip for your demo reel. Sometimes this can take persistence, especially on a low budget production.

• Finally, know that everybody had to start somewhere and the road to success can be a bumpy one.  A theatre critic once referred to a young Katharine Hepburn as a "metallic voice" with a "face like a death's head."  An annoyed stage director once told 23-year-old Alec Guinness: "You can't act!  Get off the f**king stage!"  (He went back to his flat and cried.) And a casting director reportedly brushed off a 20-something Danny DeVito, saying "Who's going to want a 5 ft. tall character actor?!!"

• So have faith in your own ability, try to develop a thick skin (not an easy task) and stay focused on a clear goal, such as where do you see yourself as an actor next year?