To Be or Not To Be…Off-Book
“My agent/manager/friend says I have to be off-book on all my auditions. I watched some auditions of actors from big shows and none of them were holding their sides in the audition…is that the secret to booking the role?!”
I get some form of this question pretty much on a weekly basis. The answer isn’t quite as simple as you might think.
Should you be off-book when it’s time to tape your audition? YES! Of course you should be! But being off-book means a lot more than just having the lines memorized (or worse, just thinking you do). When you watch, say, Britt Lower’s audition for Severance, or David Corenswet’s Superman self-tape you see they are full performances.
They don’t have their sides in their hands but if that’s all you’re seeing, you are missing the point.
How long do you think they spent preparing those auditions? Every moment was specific. You got what was happening to them, what they were seeing, what they were feeling, what they wanted, how they felt about who they were talking to…all of it. Full prepared performances. The fact that they didn’t have sides in their hands is incidental.
Can you book a role using your sides in the audition? Of course you can. I’ve booked most of my roles that way. The biggest problem I see with actors in self-taping sessions is they desperately WANT to be off book but they didn’t put the time in to truly earn that. They got rid of the sides too quickly in the process and the lines aren’t sticking or they are getting lines wrong, missing key moments. The entire performance suffers because most of the energy is being spent trying to remember the lines. You can see it in the self-tape. Using your sides in the audition doesn’t mean that you have your head down on the page and are reading the lines for the first time as a cold read. It means you’ve done all of that work I mentioned above but maybe some of the dialogue isn’t clicking with you just yet. So you mark that on your sides and know to use them when you get to that point in the scene. If you’ve ever performed in a play, think of how long you do in rehearsals before getting to the off-book stage. Are you still able to perform the role and the play while using your script? Being off-book is part of the process of acting but there is a lot of work to do before getting to that.
Really, that’s what it all boils down to…getting off book isn’t the goal of the objective. You don’t get extra points for your quick memorization skills. It’s about the performance and putting the work into that. That can take an hour or two of preparation…and when you think you’re finally ready to throw the script away spend another 30 minutes on it. Don’t be lazy…this is your career, so put the work into it.
These are the kinds of things we talk about and work on each week in my Audition Techniques online classes. If you’d like to unlock a new level in your acting craft and career, I’d love to work with you!