A Practical Guide for Actors: Tips & Advice Every Performer Should Know

Over the past year, actors have been reaching out to me for advice on everything from starting a career with no connections to self-tape auditions to contacting casting directors.

Between this and my experience assisting my wonderful agent, I’ve noticed many common challenges and mistakes—and compiled a comprehensive list of tips and advice.

Thank you for taking the time to read; I hope you find at least one useful part (if not more). Let’s begin!

IT'S QUIET...TOO QUIET

I regularly hear from fellow actors who are fed up, saying it's quiet, they're not auditioning much, or blaming their agent for not 'getting them work'.

I ask them what proactive steps they're taking to be seen. Which casting directors have they emailed to introduce themselves to? What workshops have they attended? Which networking events or film festivals have they gone to? How many indie directors or producers have they invited for a coffee and asked for advice? When are they producing their next showreel scene? What accents are they working on?

The answer is almost always "err...well, I haven't contacted many casting directors really, but I've been so busy-" etc, after having just told me how quiet things are.

The actor-agent relationship should be a partnership. There are countless things actors can be doing to ensure they’re prepared when an opportunity comes—steps that make their agents’ jobs easier and strengthen the working relationship. Ultimately, that benefits everyone.

Agents want their actors to book the jobs, and actors want to work!

LUCK IS WHEN PREPARATION MEETS OPPORTUNITY

Review everything – absolutely everything. Are your headshots the strongest they can be, and do they reflect your range?

Is your showreel professionally edited, engaging and under three minutes? Most casting directors won’t have the time to watch more than that.

How efficient is your self-tape setup? What impression do your social media accounts give?

Consider this: if you were cast in a production and asked to fly around the world in a few days' time to film, how prepared would you truly be?

SELF-TAPES

Actors have mixed feelings about self-tapes. Some long for the days of in-person meetings; others appreciate the flexibility to tape at home. Both perspectives are valid – but the reality is, self-tapes are here to stay, so we might as well get good at them.

For many actors, the instant reaction to receiving a self-tape request isn’t excitement – it's panic.

"Oh god, I need to learn all this dialogue, I need to find a reader, I need to set up the backdrop, lights and tripod, I need to move the furniture".

So, I challenge you to challenge yourself to practise and perfect your self-tape setup!

Once a week, fortnight or month, pick a two-hander scene from any play or film and set a timed challenge: within two hours, learn the lines, film it with a reading partner (a must – please don't use AI voices, they sound terrible), edit, export it under 100mb, label it correctly and have it ready to send.

A self-tape is an opportunity to act, to be seen by casting directors, directors and producers, and potentially book work! The industry is incredibly competitive, so if a casting director asks to see you, it means that they already believe you could be right for the role. Eliminate any additional stresses, so that your only goal is to present your best choice on the character and scene – and to be genuinely excited to jump into the work!

Practical tips: use a plain backdrop (ideally blue/grey), framed or cropped tightly in the edit to landscape so we don't see your shelves, posters or any distractions. Look just off-camera, well lit, so your face and eyes are clearly captured – that's what sells the performance.

Buy a decent, adjustable tripod – many are available for as little as £10. Balancing your phone on top of a stack of books or a chair is a recipe for disaster. If you’re filming in the evening, use a ring light. Invest in this equipment! If you’re unwilling to spend £30-50 on a tripod, backdrop and light, why should a director take a chance on casting you in a multi-million-pound film or TV series? The difference will show in the quality of your audition tapes.

FOLLOW THE BRIEF

You’d be amazed at how often actors fail to follow the brief correctly. Often, it’s down to nerves or anxiety, but people can forget to include an ident, mislabel files, send the wrong format, and even forget to film an entire scene!

After you’ve filmed your audition, it’s good practice to revisit the brief, ticking off each requirement. Once everything is ready to send, ask your agent to double-check it with you – fresh eyes can catch anything you might miss.

Casting directors have their own pressures and tight schedules. If they’ve asked for a specific format, file size or label, there’s a reason for it.

Tip: dress to suggest the role. If you’re auditioning for a medieval fantasy, of course, you don’t want to show up in full plate mail armour! But for a financial commercial, then a shirt and tie is appropriate. If the character is a rocker or punk, then a leather jacket works perfectly.

EDITING

Actors need to know how to edit audition tapes – stitching several takes into one video, adding a professional-looking title or end card, and exporting it in the correct format and size.

As I mentioned in my previous blog, DaVinci Resolve is a free, industry-standard, fully comprehensive editing software, with thousands of tutorials on YouTube to help you learn.

MEMORISATION SKILLS

Memorisation is a skill that needs to be developed and trained. On set, things can change quickly – you might receive new pages with little notice, and you must be ready to go. You won't always have the luxury of several days to learn your dialogue.

I recently played an extremely intense character, and my dialogue was changed the night before shooting. I’d only been cast a few days earlier and was filming two other auditions late each evening after wrapping on set – multiple pages of dialogue, in different accents, for entirely different characters and productions.

Anthony Hopkins, a fellow Welshman and one of my all-time favourite actors, famously has a habit of memorizing a new poem each week to exercise his memory and reading his scripts aloud up to 250 times to fully absorb the lines.

Personally, I’ve found writing the scenes out by hand to be the most effective for me. Don’t quote me on the science, but I’m sure I read there’s some mind-muscle connection involved! Others prefer to record the lines and listen back. Everyone’s approach is different – practise and discover what works best for you.

COLD-READING

Last month, I booked a voiceover role where I was in an isolated recording booth and handed over two hundred pages to perform – sight-reading from a tablet with no preparation time, aside from a brief note on the character’s emotion during each scene.

It’s the kind of situation you don’t think about until you’re in it, but practising your cold-reading skills is incredibly important.

A useful exercise is to pick any book off your shelf and read a random page out loud, aiming for a clean read with no tongue-twisting mistakes. Try different genres, both contemporary and classics. Record and review it. Experiment with emotions, sounds and accents! Which leads me to...

ACCENTS

I highly recommend booking sessions with a professional dialect coach to master the basics of the accent that's most relevant to your playing type and castings. Earlier this year, I worked with a fantastic coach in preparation for my first-ever American performance, in Lifetime’s THE PARADISE MURDERS.

In just two hours, she broke down the fundamentals – consonant and vowel placement, mouth shape, overall resonance—and gave me several reference voices and “go-to” phrases so I can drop back into Standard American at any time.

There are also excellent free resources online. My favourite is The International Dialects of English Archive (IDEA), which offers audio samples of virtually every English-speaking accent, with recordings from a wide range of genders, ages, and backgrounds.

A few months ago, I needed to learn a Detroit accent for a U.S. film audition and had absolutely no idea what it sounded like. I checked IDEA and instantly found 25 sample recordings. It’s an essential resource for any actor!

NEW MATERIAL

Just like with your self-tape setup, you can – and should – be filming yourself performing monologues. This isn’t only great practice, but it gives you fresh material to send to casting directors and producers.

When I first started acting, I lived in a small coastal town with no classes available or scene partners to work with. I began filming monologues alone, reviewing them repeatedly to figure out what worked, what didn’t work and what simply wasn’t good enough and needed fixing.

After weeks of this, I finally produced a monologue that I was genuinely proud of – from Jez Butterworth’s black comedy Mojo. The character was the gangster Baby, played wonderfully in the movie adaptation by Game of Thrones and The Wire actor Aiden Gillen.

I sent this out to anyone and everyone I could find, catching the attention of a producer who ended up booking me in his horror film.

NETWORKING

Introduce yourself to casting directors, directors and producers! They’re incredibly busy and may not be able to reply to every email, but they will remember you – especially if you keep in touch with fresh material.

An introduction email should be short and to the point. Include a few sentences about who you are, playing type (age, look, accent, etc), your credits, a small headshot and links to your reel, IMDB, Spotlight, and Stage32 profiles.

Personalize each email. If you’ve seen a show they cast and loved it, let them know! It’s about building genuine long-term connections.

NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

I’ll leave you with one final link—the one I’ve found most useful and often return to: a full acting-for-screen workshop by the legendary, Oscar-winning Michael Caine. In it, he covers a range of topics, including acting for camera versus theatre, hitting your marks, eyeline placement, line delivery, and workshops on several scenes from Alfie and Educating Rita with drama students. It’s an absolute must-watch for every actor!

Michael Caine Teaches Acting In Film

Here endeth the blog! I hope you’ve found it useful. Please feel free to reach out—I’d love to hear your thoughts, whether you agree or disagree, or if you have your own tips and advice to share, I’d love to hear them!

Here endeth the blog! I hope you’ve found it useful. Please feel free to reach out—I’d love to hear your thoughts, whether you agree or disagree, or if you have your own tips and advice to share, I’d love to hear them!

Let's hear your thoughts in the comments below!

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