How To Start An Acting Career?

How To Start Acting

“How to start acting?” Aspiring actors want to know what some concrete steps they can take if they are at the very beginning of their acting careers.

I discussed this the other day with best-selling author Brian O’Neil (Acting As A Business: Strategies For Success) and this is his list of 5 things you can easily do to start your acting career.

1. Get some good, solid training in acting technique (i.e. Meisner, Method, etc.) as well as specialty training, i.e. on-camera commercial training, acting for film, how to audition, etc.

2. Put together some monologues for your auditions. It will do you little justice if you get a meeting with an agent or get an audition and you don’t have anything prepared.

3.Contact your local (reputable ones!) theatres in your area to attend staged readings of plays, participate as a reader, read stage directions or usher. This will put you in close proximity to the people you want to meet (people who cast the plays, directors, artistic directors, other actors: all sources of contact and information for you.

Participating as a reader in staged readings with reputable theatres, extra work and soap work along with your training, training, training are great ways to start to build a résumé, especially if you have nothing to put on it.

4.Contact agencies that cast for background work. Extra or background work provides a great education to see how actors really work on set. You get to see it all up close. It’s great experience at the beginning of your career.

5.Find out who the people are who cast for soap operas (especially if you are in New York or Los Angeles). Getting work on soaps is very accessible even if you don’t have an agent. It’s relatively easy to get cast in small roles for these programs and there are a lot of opportunities every day as soaps are shot 5 days per week, 52 weeks per year.

Brian told me about a client of his who was able to book 12 days on a soap in New York and he did it without an agent. He told of another who booked three days, all speaking roles; once again without an agent.

Participating as a reader in staged readings with reputable theatres, extra work and soap work along with your training, training, training are great ways to start to build a résumé, especially if you have nothing to put on it.

6.In addition, finding an agent for on-camera commercials and commercial print and/or voice-over work, are other opportunities you could pursue in the meantime. You must take into consideration, however, that those areas also require certain skill sets. For example, there are specialized classes for on-camera commercials and also improvisation is a great help to prepare for that kind of work as well.

If you want some more tips on how to start acting, click here where you’ll find lots of all-around information on starting an acting career.