Getting, Keeping & Working with Your Acting Agent: The Compact Guide

J BR

• Publisher: Nick Hern Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781788503761
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Acting & Auditioning

This empowering, informative guide explains everything actors need to know about agents – how to find one, what they do, and how to work with them effectively to help you succeed in your career.

If you're currently seeking an agent, discover how to research and contact them, and what they're looking for in their clients. And if you already have one, learn how to manage and get the most out of this crucial relationship.

Also included are invaluable tips on how to write a great CV; obtain attention-grabbing headshots, showreels and voicereels; prepare for and excel at auditions; embrace social media; protect your mental health; and much more.

The Compact Guides are pocket-sized introductions for actors and theatremakers, each tackling a key topic in a clear and comprehensive way. Written by industry professionals with extensive hands-on experience of their subject, they provide you with maximum information in minimum time.

1. Getting…

Getting an agent is often seen as an obstacle that needs to be overcome, or the first step on the way to becoming a working actor. It is neither. An agent is simply something one may choose to acquire along the route, someone to walk the path with you whilst you acquire other skills and build your CV.

Getting an agent is not the end point, nor is it the point at which the real work of becoming an actor starts. Like everything, like learning to act itself, getting an agent is a process. Understanding that process will make acquiring an agent easier, and will help you to understand more about what agents are looking for and how to present yourself to them, and will even teach you a little about how the business side of the industry works.

Who Are You?

The single piece of advice that will serve you best, not just at the beginning of your career but throughout, is ‘Be yourself.’

This advice is going to come at you from everyone you speak to. Acting coaches will tell you, agents will beg you, casting directors will say it is all they are looking for. You will tweet it, post it on Instagram, pin it to your mood boards. There are any number of different inspirational quotes that will be liked, shared or retweeted, from the lofty ‘γνῶθι σεαυτόν’ (‘Know thyself’), as inscribed on the Oracle at Delphi, to the camp ‘Know who you are and deliver at all times’, preached by RuPaul.

Knowing yourself is where we’ll begin. Not with how to write an email, not with who to approach, not with how to sell yourself. You may, of course, leap forward to those chapters and plough straight ahead with sending a thousand applications for representation to every agent listed in Contacts – but it will be a waste of time.

Begin at the beginning. Start with working out who you are and what makes you different to the seventy thousand other actors listed on Spotlight. Knowing why you stand out and what makes you unique will make the onerous task of actually standing out and being unique far easier.

It may be distasteful to employ the language of the corporate boardroom in the creative workplace, but actors are a commodity and it is your agent’s job to market you. To be basic: an agent sells and a casting director buys, so it’s worth spending a little bit of time working out who you are and what you have to offer, to know what it is you’ve got for sale.

Here’s the truth: very often we don’t know what we’re looking for until we see it. Bold, decisive choices being made by people who know what they can offer are what capture attention in the audition room. The weakest auditions are generally given by those who attempt to predict what the panel are looking for.

Actors who know who they are bring authenticity to their roles because they understand that acting is not ‘putting something on’ – it is understanding what to reveal. Actors do not ‘pretend to be other people’. Children in a playground pretend to be other people. Great actors interpret, filter and distil through their own experiences, skill and technique. Actors are artists, not children playing dress-up. An actor who understands who they are and what they bring to the table will make better and braver choices than an actor who is unsure of themselves. Orson Welles, in the 1995 documentary Orson Welles: The One-Man Band, described this philosophy perfectly:

Acting is like sculpture, it’s what you take away from yourself to reveal the truth of what you’re doing that makes a performance.

Do you know what your offering is? Do you know what it is you bring to the table? How do you present yourself to the world outwardly? Please take some time to answer the following questions before you hurtle ahead:

• What is my age range?

Be honest and realistic. Stockard Channing may have played a high-schooler in Grease when she was 33 (a gap of fifteen years), but your playing age is unlikely to be any more than five years either side of your real age.

• What is my physical type?

Are you stocky/plus-size? Slim? Average? Toned/muscular? Tall/short?

• What is my voice type?

Is your voice rich and deep, or high and light? Do you speak with resonance? Do you command attention when you speak? Do you have a wide range of vocal tones and colours in your everyday speech, or are you more limited? What about pace? Are you slow and thoughtful, or fast and chatty?

• What energy do I give off? What is my personality?

This is quite an important one, but often overlooked. What energy do you bring into the room? Are you bubbly and light, intimidating or scary? Are you warm and inviting, or stand-offish? Do people warm to you quickly and easily, or are you more reserved? Are you the life and soul of the party or are you a quiet wallflower? Are you outgoing or introverted? Do you love meeting new people and getting involved with a new group, or are you more comfortable around people you know well?

• Who do I want to be?

Sometimes it is useful to frame this question as ‘How do I want to be remembered?’ What attributes and traits are most important to you? This is not asking who you want to become, it is more about what traits you already have that you are most proud of. What type of person do you want to be? If you had the choice, how would you want people to think of you?

• Who is my audience?

Who do you want to be seen by? Are you more drawn to working in gritty urban dramas, or do you feel affinity with period work? Will a typical audience take to you more in light comedy or in classical drama? A classic Hollywood action hero, or waif-like heroine? Where is an average audience less likely to question you?

• What is my ideal outcome?

Right now, with your current look, personality and skill set, what is your ideal outcome? What is your most likely casting? All actors dream of having a versatile career and most believe they could play anything, given the chance, but it’s good to begin with truly understanding your limitations.

• What is my consistent offering?

Who are you in the morning? What is your day-to-day offering to the world? When you’re not pretending to be someone else, who are you, most consistently?

• What is my unique story?

No one can be you, the way that you can. The unique circumstances of your birth, upbringing and training have created you. What is the individual, unique story of your life so far?

A keen eye will notice that many of these are not fixed attributes. Physical shape can be changed, muscles can be worked on, weight can be lost or gained, a voice type can be altered, hair can be cut. It is astonishing how many changes can be made. Consider, first, what you have right now. What are you working with at this moment?

This leads on to discussions of stereotyping and questions of representation, of how we are perceived in a visual industry. Pamela Robertson Wojick, in her essay ‘Typecasting’, published in Criticism, vol. 45, no. 2 (2003), wrote that ‘most actors reject typecasting. Rare indeed is the actor who admits being happily typecast. In fact, film actors have decried typecasting almost since the beginning of film-making.’

Knowing how you are usually perceived is not the same as agreeing to it. It is incumbent upon all of us in the industry to reject outdated tropes and to encourage a more inclusive and diverse industry. We must be wary, in this approach to finding out our ‘type’, that it does not become an exercise in stereotypes. Type is shared characteristics, typical of ‘the ideal’ of a group or class, whereas stereotype is a formulaic and simplified conception, usually based on image. In an industry that is highly visual and a screen language that is based in semiotics, we need to walk the fine line of understanding type whilst striving to avoid stereotype. In order to work against type, or to challenge stereotypes, beginning with an investigation of how we are currently perceived will help us to understand where we might place in a visual industry and the existing semiotics of screen.

In the actor–agent relationship, the agent is making decisions every day about the actor – and the actor has little control over it. There are many biases in our industry that we would do well to recognise. We must all work together to challenge the outdated biases that have been accepted, and actors who find themselves repeatedly asked to audition for the same type of character should be prepared to raise this as a concern with their agent. Andrew Scott, speaking to Fourthwall Magazine, put it succinctly:

Once you’re in a show that’s successful, you can suddenly be asked to do the same thing all of the time. But if you don’t want to, you just have to not say yes, you know? It’s pretty simple.

The personality types are usually much more interesting to investigate than the physical types – after all, you can change many things about how you look but underneath, pretty much, you remain the same person.

Once you’ve answered the list of questions above, ask some friends to answer them about you as well. You may be surprised at the answers. You may find it challenging to realise that your friends don’t see you in the way you see yourself. Understanding how, and why, others see you in the way they do is all part of the journey of understanding what it is you present to the world, and how the world sees you. Weirdly, one of the best ways to find out more about yourself is to ask other people. We can be unusually ignorant of our own strengths, not to mention peculiarly blind when it comes to our faults. Asking other people how they see you can be painful but also revelatory. It may confirm what you think of yourself or it may contradict it.

Speaking of contradictions, once you’ve asked other people what they think of you, learn when to ignore it. Other people may have an ulterior motive for their response. Your private tutor might not want to lose you as a client, your loved ones perhaps won’t see you quite as dispassionately as you need them to, some of your peers may even be jealous of you. You are also unlikely to get the best results from simply putting your headshot up on social media and asking these questions, as many people will simply agree with what other people have said rather than thinking it through for themselves.

You’re probably familiar with the approach to text that asks you to go through a script making a note of what your character says about themselves and what others say about your character, examining how your character is seen on the outside, and contrasting that with how the character sees themselves.

Think of Malvolio in Twelfth Night, for example. Much of the humour, and indeed almost all of the pathos, comes from the contrast between how he sees himself and how he is seen by others, what is shown versus what is concealed. This standard acting exercise is a wonderful way to create layers and depth in character. So look at yourself as if you were a character. If the unexamined life is not worth living, you had better get examining.

In exactly the same way as approaching a role by examining the inner and outer characteristics of the character, it is also vitally important that you know your own inner and outer characteristics too. The questions you answered above, if answered honestly, will have given you some indication of your ‘outers’ and ‘inners’. Now, just as you would with a character analysis, filter other people’s opinions of your outer through what you know about your inner. No one but no one knows or understands you better than you do yourself.

A word of caution when doing this forensic examination of yourself: learn to distinguish fact from interpretation.

• Fact: If you are six-foot tall you will never play Boq the Munchkin in a professional production of Wicked.

• Interpretation: If you are buxom, petite and quirky, you will never play the romantic lead.

Do not confuse irrefutable, unalterable facts with disputable, contentious interpretations.

You may find it difficult to place yourself under the microscope. Most of us do. Doubtless you have been told hundreds of times that you need to develop a thick skin to survive in this industry. Well, you do, and it requires practice. It requires you to be more honest and analytical of yourself than anyone else would ever dare to be.

Use all your acting training and turn it on yourself. Hot-seat yourself, ask yourself difficult and probing questions, interview yourself as though you were Andrew Neil asking the questions, not Ellen DeGeneres. Incorporate the practice of unfiltered stream-of-consciousness writing into your daily routine. Familiarise yourself with and practise the Johari window technique for self-awareness. Try a Myers–Briggs test or look into your Enneagram personality type. All these are available for free on the internet and, if nothing else, can provide an entertaining half-hour. Investigate yourself both dispassionately and with compassion.

In all of this work and analysis, you should bear in mind that where and who you are now is not fixed forever. Check in with yourself regularly. As you grow and develop as an actor, as you experience life and are challenged, you will change.Your 21-year-old self will have a very different outlook on life than your 41-year-old self, or even your 31-year-old self. Knowing who you are right now will also give you a guide as to where you need assistance and nurturing, where you need to develop.

An honest and in-depth understanding of who you currently are will also help you to avoid comparing yourself to others.We all do this. In the age of social media it is almost impossible to avoid doing this, even though we know it’s ridiculous. We know that comparing our insides to someone else’s outside is pointless. We know we are comparing our first rehearsal to someone else’s press night – and yet we continually do it.

Our Instagram, our Twitter feed, our Facebook profiles are not the full story of who we are. They are just the stories we want to present to the world. Social-media accounts only tell part of the story, showing a constructed personality with little nuance or subtlety. What we present is an idealised version of our life. What we see on social media is often very far from the truth. Forget about comparing yourself to someone else. The only way you’re going to find your route through the woods is to acknowledge and accept that you are carving out your own path.

Some books aimed at actors will talk about the work of ‘knowing yourself ’ as though it’s a question of discovering your brand. Branding is a useful marketing exercise that’s about building on the perceptions others have of you. A brand is not something you sit down and design from scratch. Determining brand values involves examining not only your own perceptions of yourself, but also analysing what others think or say about you. Your brand is what you present to the world: all the good bits, some of the flaws, neatly packaged up and presented in the most flattering light. Theoretically, your brand might represent what you stand for, who you perceive yourself to be, and the type of actor you want to become.

That said, branding for an actor is balderdash – here’s why: Branding identifies a product for sale in a specific market. It is not usually about taking a completely unique product and selling it. It is about looking at the restrictions, traditions and parameters of the existing marketplace and identifying how one particular brand is better than others within those restrictions. Branding relies on every offering within the market sector being approximately the same, but highlighting areas where one brand is a bit better than others.

You are not a brand. You cannot view yourself as completely unique and original if you see yourself as being broadly the same as everyone else. Whilst branding for actors is useful up to a point, it does not leave you room or scope to be unique and individual. It encourages you to be roughly the same as everyone else. Be careful about branding yourself to be the same as everyone else. Do not let branding lead you to ignore a real and truthful investigation into what makes you completely and utterly unique.

When you define your brand with a perceived audience (that casting director whose eye you want to catch, that agent you want to attract) in mind, you are in danger of defining who you are based on outside perspectives. Your brand becomes a fixed story, but our personal stories are fluid and changeable, they are not permanent. The goal with this work is to learn how to express yourself authentically, not to conform to what you perceive the ‘market’ wants you to be. Authenticity is the aim.

On ‘knowing yourself’, the actor Jenna Russell probably says it best:

If I could look back, I would say ‘Trust who you are.’ That’s the only thing you’ve got.You are your unique thing. It’s going to fit some things and not fit others. Be at peace with that. Trust in saying ‘This is who I am.’

Do the work. Find out who you are. Tell the world.

Researching Agents

Before you start emailing agents, first you must research them. Having engaged in detailed, extensive work on yourself, finding out who you are and what your consistent offering is, you will have begun to have some thoughts on the type of agent that is right for you at this particular moment. Your research on agents is a continuation of that process. But it is also the area a lot of actors fall down on. Too often they rush it or overlook it, leading them to approach agents who are unsuitable for them or to approach them in the wrong way.

Research is a vitally important skill for actors. Casting directors recommend it as imperative to an actor’s preparation, advising actors to thoroughly research the production team, director and writer before coming into the room. Given this is such an important skill, it makes sense that an actor would want to demonstrate their ability to do it. If you do not accurately research the agency you are applying to, then we may, reasonably, assume you will not do research around the auditions we send you up for. Demonstrating your research ability and attention to detail, particularly in a first approach to an agent, should not be underestimated.

An incorrect or badly researched approach is usually a waste of an actor’s precious time. A lot of this can be solved if you do the research at the beginning, and work smarter, not harder.

It may be that many actors, whilst taught how to prepare and research a role, are not taught how to use those skills to research agencies.

One of the most valuable ways to research agencies is to use...