Avoid Memorizing Acting Audition Monologues

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Dr. Charles Grimes and I'm speaking on behalf of Expert Village about preparing for the business-end of an audition and preparing for callbacks. Don't memorize your performance. Be aware that you're in a situation where you're recreating the monologue for new, again, and in front of a whole bunch of people. It's not the final time you're going to give this monologue. It's always a process. You may feel that you have every phrase, every intonation, every bit of silence, every bit of blocking perfectly planned out. We know from being an actor that a planned out performance is often a dull, a flat one. It's quite simply very boring and it comes off wrote or mechanical, like you are an acting robot. The director wants to see you investing something right in that moment, being alive in that moment. That's what they're looking for. They're going to take your life, they're going to take your energy and shape it in the way they want. So if all they see is someone who knows how to give a performance that they've planned out in their head and leaves, they probably don't want to work with that person. They really don't offer any creativity to the director. You may think that your monologue is so well rehearsed, that you've gotten everything down to a science. That's not a good place to be. Go back to the complexity of the monologue. Go back to the drives that the character has, find something new. Be aware that you'll have extra energy in this audition. Don't do it just like the way you did it before. Good actors never do that. It's always new, spontaneous and fresh."