SET YOUR STANDARDS- TAKE THE RISK

Make no mistake: You are your work. The audition is a transaction in which you are an equal. Your point of view is valid. If it wasn’t, you wouldn’t be in that room.

Your first duty is not to please them. It’s easy to get lost in the pursuit of pleasing casting, the agent, or whomever you are auditioning for, however, it’s a path to rarely pleasing yourself.

Your first duty is to dynamically bring the character to life in a way that’s personal to you and honors the intent of the writers and the world they have created. If you enter the transaction with anything less than that, you devalue your work.

It’s not easy to create this confident native, especially when real-life stress is muddying the waters. But, you simply must, you have no other choice. You truly don’t.

So, let this truth set you free: Take a big creative shot. What’s the worst thing that could happen? Rejection? No. Humiliation? Nope. The worst thing that could happen is that you could be mediocre. Sometimes even being wonderfully wrong is far better and can signify a risk-taker, an explorer, or maybe even an artist. Focus on doing a great piece of work to your own standards first. Their standards may be ridiculously high or shockingly low. Frankly, it doesn’t matter. Your standards have to become high and remain high, inviting them into your world.

Ultimately, your job as an actor is to be indelible. Unforgettable. That’s it. If you engage in this process as an artist, what ‘they’ will want might very possibly be you.

~Natalia oxo