How to Pace Acting Auditions

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. I found that in a cold reading there are a couple of pretty good techniques that you can use to make yourself appear at your best. First, take your time. If you take your time you'll be giving yourself a great opportunity to put dramatic flesh on this script, whatever it is. You'll pay attention to the words that mean things. You'll get yourself an emotional flow. Also, go big. You want to make sure that you're making a choice that's recognizable, an interpretive choice. Make it clear to the director that you're going for something, that you have the ability to exist in the moment and be creative. Just go in a certain direction with the speech. Give it a shot. If you go big, at least you did something. If you did nothing, if you didn't try to give the reading any kind of a flavor, you've done a poor job in the cold reading. Let me give you just a few seconds of examples about taking your time and going big. I opened this book to a random page, and I'm going to read as if I were in a cold reading..."You're stinking the place out. You're an old robber, there's no getting away from it. You're an old skate; you don't belong in a nice place like this. You're an old barbarian. Honest. You got no business wandering about in an unfurnished flat. I could charge 7 quid a week for this, if I wanted to. Going to take her tomorrow, 350 a year, exclusive." So there what I tried to do was to go big. Anytime I caught the flavor of the character's aggression, the character's dismissiveness, the character's meanness, I just went with it as big as I could, without being ridiculous. That's an important thing; try to make your cold reading count for something. Do something with it. Find an emotional arc - happy to sad, mean to not mean. Do something with it, take a choice, go with it. Of course you can be wrong, you've just seen the script, they know you might be wrong. Just try something."