First, communicate with them. It’s pilot season. Everyone’s stressed. You’re one of many clients on someone’s roster. Remember that they are working hard to get all of their clients jobs and it’s important to have faith that they know what they’re doing and they’re invested in helping you get work. If they weren’t they wouldn’tRead more
Blog
Pilot season. How do you survive it? What do you do when you test for multiple roles but don’t end up getting any of them? What do you do when you see your friends going out for weekly auditions and you haven’t heard from your reps in weeks? What do you do when youRead more
Stop getting caught up in how you think things are supposed to look. Feelings. Love. Careers. Connection. Possibility. When you give up the form in which you think these things must appear, you’re instead open to the miracle of them showing up all around you all the time in ways that are a lotRead more
What if you were given the role of a Lifetime? A character that’s beautiful and dangerous and mysterious and exciting and complicated and messed up and Divinity expressed in tangible form and spectacular and empathetic and scary and . . . well . . . human? I asked an actress this and she said,Read more
I got asked by an actor the other day, “How do you become more confident?” I thought that was a good question, considering, like many things – we keep searching for the answers outside of us. Confidence comes from the inside. It’s not gained by looking hot or having lots of credits or beingRead more
A thing experienced is not a thing perceived. We so often are in our heads about what we think something looks like (a choice, an idea, a commitment to something) that instead of committing to that thing and having the experience, we second-guess it based on what we think the casting director is lookingRead more
Whenever I’m in NY teaching at our school there, I’m reminded of how much humanity is about . . . well . . . just being human. Maybe because LA is shaped by a car culture, it’s so easy to remove ourselves from life (from connection, from vulnerability, from having to confront life head-onRead more
Playing. That’s the thing. What happened to that? Since the beginning of time, that’s the real reason to be an actor. The ancient Greeks may have called their little skits “tragedies” but the word is a compound of two Greek words: “goat” and “to sing.” So, ummmm . . . they were definitely having funRead more
Stop auditioning! What? “Well, Tony, I can’t very well get a job if I don’t audition!” Yes, you can. In fact, you book jobs when you take the whole paradigm of what an audition is and turn it on its head. The term “auditioning” stacks you against yourself and becomes an implicit order ofRead more
Go all in. That’s what filmmaker Steve McQueen, director of 12 Years A Slave, says actors should be doing all the time. Always. But we don’t. Why? Mostly, because we have a number of defaults to keep us from really committing fully, 100%. In our lives. In our work. In our auditioning. This isRead more