Why 50% of Actors don’t get cast

This is a true story of why 50% of the actors who submitted for a role didn’t get cast.

Trust me, I take no pleasure in telling this story but I’m doing so in the hope that some of you in that 50% group will read it and change your attitude and maybe get cast next time.

It begins a few months ago when we posted a casting notice here on enCAST looking for actors for a film. It was, all in all, the kind of film and the kind of role actors really look for: a well paid lead role in a full length drama film shooting in a cool location in Southern Europe. (There were a few other roles as well, but let’s just talk about the lead for now.)

And if that were not enough, there was also a famous and well respected English actor featuring in the film and working alongside them would be a coup for any up and coming actor.

So the casting notice went up and within days we had received a lot of submissions. The production company had asked us to help with the preliminary casting so we began to go through them. Almost every actor who submitted could have played the role (i.e. they were the right age, look, etc) and since there were other roles in the film to cast as well, we wrote back to every single actor who submitted and asked them to send us a very short self-tape where they performed a scene from the film.

Now remember, every single actor we wrote to could have got the role. In fact, we WANTED to get back loads of awesome self-tapes: that is what makes Casting Directors (CDs) get excited! We were rooting for these actors. We couldn’t wait to send on a whole bunch of self-tapes to the production showcasing incredible talent so every time an email arrived in our inbox we opened it up and waited eagerly to see what the self-tape was like.

But now, months later with the casting long closed, I have to tell you that we received just half the self-tapes we asked for.

In other words, we offered a whole bunch of actors an incredible opportunity to be in a potentially huge film and half the actors we asked just couldn’t be bothered to even write back to us or make the self-tape.

Naturally they weren’t even considered for any of the roles.

The irony is, of course, we loved the look of some of those actors who didn’t respond. Some of them we genuinely thought could stand a good chance of getting the role and yet… they just blew it. It’s hard to imagine, isn’t it. Acting is a tough business and here we were handing a load of actors a really great opportunity and half of them didn’t even care enough to make the effort.

(Fortunately we received some amazing self-tapes which we sent on to the production and they selected the very best who are now deep in rehearsals for a shoot later this year… but that’s another story.)

So I will end with a simple plea: if we (or a production) ever ask you for a self-tape it means we think and we hope that you might be the perfect actor for a role so please don’t ruin your chances before you begin by not even making the self-tape.

April, 2022

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