Having spent a good deal of the holiday reading upcoming pilot scripts, I can tell you that we are in for even more procedural shows. There are more legal, medical, and military scripts than any other genre. So, what is casting looking for in your procedural audition?
First of all they’re looking for credibility. Whether you’re the expert witness, victim, patient, murderer, or attorney, you need to be believable. This doesn’t mean indicating or playing the dictionary definition of the role. It means embodying the role fully.
Take the murderer, for example. The audience may not even know that you’re the murderer, but when we find out we have a moment of recognition: “Yes! I knew it all along!” For the actor this means connecting to the parts of yourself that can feel the degree of rage, scorn, hurt, terror that would compel someone to kill. Not playing a killer, but embodying the emotions that would drive a killer.
If you’re the forensic genius, coroner, legal scholar, or some other type of expert you, of course, need to know the lines, but you also need to have a sense of natural ease with the technical dialogue. If it doesn’t sound like a second language coming
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