Recently, we were at a holiday event and had the opportunity to hear a director on an award-winning series talk about the odd, funny, unfortunate, and misguided ways actors go into auditions thinking they have a leg up on the competition, only to take missteps that end up eliminating them.
One actor came into the audition and gossiped about a mutual friend of the director’s, thinking it was a way to connect or seem special. But it just ended up distracting and detracting from the audition and getting her eliminated.
Another actor started an intense analytic discussion about the script, leading the director and producer to assume it would lead to a genius audition. Unfortunately, all the talk fizzled and the audition didn’t live up to the expectations of the pre-audition discussion.
READ: Audition Like You Don’t Care
Another story the director told was about actors who tried to be personal and overly-friendly, not appreciating a director’s limited power in series casting—the producer and showrunner should have been the actor’s focus. Other examples of actor shooting themselves in the foot included nervously talking through the meeting prior to auditioning or self-deprecatingly expressing a
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