How to Tap into Emotions in Acting Auditions

Series Summary

An acting audition is a sample of a piece of work that an aspiring actor/actress performs in order to get hired for a role in a movie, play, or show. Casting directors hold auditions in order to view the range of an actor’s talent in the form of a memorized monologue or reading an act of work that the actor has never seen before. Often times, casting directors want to see emotion, body language and assumption of a particular part in the actor’s performance.

Are you auditioning for the first time and don’t know what to expect? Do you need a refresher course in auditioning for a part? Well, look no further! Our drama expert, Dr. Charles Grimes, teaches you a important part of auditioning- rehearsing monologues. Most theater auditions will require you to do a monologue, and no one is perfect at it the first time. You really need to work at it. Thankfully, Dr. Grimes shows you tips for land that acting job. So, what are you waiting for? Learn how to rehearse for a monologue today!

Video Transcript

"This is Dr. Charles Grimes, and I'm talking on behalf of Expert Village about rehearsing a monologue. A big challenge for any actor is tapping into their own emotions so that what they're performing on stage appears real and powerful to everyone involved including directors and casting agents. Let's talk about a couple of ways that actors try to do this. And again, it's a very odd exercise when in which you're speaking someone else's words, but showing some representation of your own emotion on stage. Often, we hide our emotion. We try to appear neutral, calm, but we're not interesting in seeing neutral and calm characters. We want emotional characters. Thanaslovski was one of the famous acting coaches of all time. He talked about an as if-- a mental exercise, in which you put yourself in the place of the character and imagine, what would make me feel the way the character apparently is? So you're taking something from your own life, making an equation from your own circumstances, and allowing that to determine what you're thinking and feeling in that moment. Two other ways to do this, are what's called a given circumstance, and a sense memory. In a sense memory, you meditate back into an experience you had by recreating all the sensory and physical details that you can come up with. If you do that long enough, it puts you in that very same mood that you were in when the event happened. Another technique that is not so internal is what we call the given circumstance. Hank will explain how he uses this and what it means to him. The given circumstance is just an exercise about your imagination. You want to imagine that something's happened to you and it is something that will compel you to use your emotion for the monologue. For example, if I want to seem happy, I might imagine that I've just been given a paycheck for a million dollars. A million dollars seems unreal to me, I might just say a hundred dollars say to get my paycheck. Or I might imagine that I just kissed a pretty girl. Thank you Hank, and one of my favorite sense memories is when a very pretty girl stood me up and that helps me perform Waiting for Godot, a very depressing play by Samuel Beckett."