Your CV or Résumé

After your headshots and showreel, your CV (curriculum or résumé) is the most important document you send a casting agent. It tells them more about you – who you are and what you have done in the past.

What not to put in your CV

But before going on to what you need to include in your CV, here’s a short checklist of what you shouldn’t include.

  • Pictures
  • Your phone number

Remember, the CD has already seen your headshots; they want to check your CV to see your credits – they don’t want to see any more headshots there! So whilst you might have just 1 single small headshot at the beginning of your CV, don’t have any more as CDs often find it annoying.

And then, just to be on the safe side, don’t put your personal phone number in your CV. (If you have an agent, then  by all means put their phone number, that’s fine.) Instead, for contact, put your email address.

What to put in your CV

Ok, that over, here’s what you need to make a good CV.

First off, remember not to say too much in your CV. This is because:

  1. You don’t want to bore the CD
  2. You want to leave the CD wanting more

That said, this is a good idea of what a very basic CV should look like:

  1. About you – basic details
  2. Credits – what acting work you’ve done
  3. Other relevant information

1. About you

Put some basic details at the top:

  1. Your professional name
  2. Your email (or that of your agent)
  3. Nationality & languages you act in
  4. Your location
  5. Height & weight – or whatever they can’t see on your headshots

2. Your credits

Keep this simple. Don’t put anything which is NOT related to acting.

Then, with your credits, group it into CINEMA – TELEVISION – THEATRE – ADVERTS and begin with the most recent and for each item give the title, the director, the role and the year.

There is an important caveat here: if you have lots of credits, then put the keep the most important but feel free to leave off the smaller jobs. Again, the CD doesn’t want to be bored so leave off all those walk-on parts or smaller roles if you have plenty of good roles to head up your list.

3. Other Information

Finally add some other useful information. This can include:

  1. Your training as an actor
  2. Links to your own website, your enCAST profile, your IMDB page, etc
  3. Useful skills: stunt, military, dance, etc

CV Format

After you’ve written it – in Word, Open Office or whatever – convert it to PDF format. 

Ideally it will be just 1 page (or possibly 2). If, however, you find it’s much longer than this you should break it down and have:

  • a CV for film
  • a CV for theatre
  • a CV for television

And while we are at it, once you’ve created your CVs you should translate them into all the languages you work in. If you submit for jobs in English, German, and French then make sure you have a separate for each language to send the CD.

Convert to PDF

To save your Word document as PDF, simply click the FILE menu item and then SAVE AS where you can choose PDF. Read more about this here.

Alternatively, you can convert most Word document types to PDF using this free converter from Adobe or if you have an RTF file, us this RTF to PDF online converter.

Conclusion

And that’s it!

The idea here is to keep it simple. All your CV needs to do is tell the casting agent what experience you have and give them a few basic facts about you.

They don’t want to see reams and reams of biography, quotes about your career and how good you are, pictures or other stuff.

No. 

They have seen your pictures, watched your showreel and now just want to find out a little more about you and see what experience you have.

In other words: keep is simple.

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