AKTA INSIGHTS: HOW GREAT ACTORS ACTUALLY PREPARE FOR AUDITIONS

Writer: Takunda Muzondiwa

I Waiting Rewires the Nervous System 

No one is auditioning as much as they wish they’d like to. Sometimes Spotlight feels like an abandoned town square. Nothing moves. Nothing arrives. This strange, snail-paced suspension defines so much of an actor’s working life.

And then, without warning, that silence breaks.

A notification flashes onto your phone. Big text. Urgent tone. Your agent asks you to get a tape in as soon as you can. The shift is violent. One second you are numb with waiting, and the next your whole body is flooded with adrenaline. The inbox that was deserted seconds ago suddenly feels hostile and demanding. You open the sides and it is astonishing how quickly you feel like you have never done this before. You are left standing in the middle of your own flat, heart racing, wondering absurd things like how far away the camera should be, where your eyeline is supposed to live, whether you even remember how to act at all.

Self-taping has a particular cruelty to it at this moment. There is no warm up. You are simply alone with a lens, a few pages of text, and a deadline that suddenly feels impossible. Who can you call to read with you when the scene is intimate and it’s midday on a Tuesday. How do you get into character quickly when the neighbours are drilling and your brain is still half-asleep from weeks of not needing to be sharp. You fumble. You overthink. You start and stop and start again. It feels toddler-like, this sense of being uncoordinated in something you know, somewhere deeper, that you are actually extremely good at. Few things are more frustrating than this feeling. 

And yet this is the cycle most actors live inside. Long periods of stagnation followed by sudden, chaotic bursts of demand. We are expected to be ready at all times, even though the conditions of the industry actively train us not to be. Our nervous systems learn the shape of waiting far more intimately than we learn the shape of opportunity. So when opportunity finally knocks, it often meets a body that is out of practice at being brave. 

This is where the deeper misunderstanding begins. Because beneath all the fumbling and frustration, there is something else burning. We want to be good at this. Not just employable, not just booked, but genuinely undeniable. We want to make work that people argue about, that makes them cry, that outlives us. We want to be part of theatre that leaves something cracked open in the room, of films that become reference points in other people’s lives. That hunger is real and it is noble, but it becomes dangerous when it is only aimed at the finished product. When we start treating auditions as something separate from the art we claim to love, we create a quiet contradiction in ourselves: we want to do great work, but we rush through the very place where great work is first asked for.

The audition is not a doorway to the film or the play. The audition is already it. Auditions already contain your listening, your imagination, your courage, your understanding of human behaviour. And if we bring panic, carelessness, or apology into that space, we are not just hurting our chances, we are rehearsing a way of relating to our own craft that will follow us long after the audition has passed.

II Preparation is a Practice, Not a Panic Response 

One of the most disorienting lessons I’ve learned recently came from a tape request that should have felt effortless. The role involved a character who moved between English and my mother tongue, Shona, with the ease of someone who had lived in both worlds all their life. It was one of those rare moments where a role feels uncannily aligned, as if someone, somewhere, had written it with me in mind. And yet, when I began taping, something unexpected surfaced: I had never once self-taped in my mother tongue before. Not for practice. Not out of curiosity. Not even as an experiment. The role fit me like a glove, and still, I was scrambling to find my footing inside it, wishing I had spent more time inhabiting this part of myself before it was suddenly required on demand.

That experience clarified something essential. The moment an audition lands in your inbox is not the moment to begin discovering your instrument. Much of the labour should already have been done. The danger for actors is that our love for the craft can become deceptively comforting. Passion convinces us that when the moment comes, we will rise to meet it, that inspiration will arrive on cue, that instinct will save us. But no matter how much you love acting, you are not good at things you do not practice. Devotion without structure does not translate into reliability, and reliability is what auditions quietly test for.

Preparation, then, is less about the specific role and more about building a body of work you can draw from under pressure. This means actively discovering the kinds of roles you are suited to, rather than waiting for casting to tell you. It means building tangible archives: documents or spreadsheets where you catalogue scenes, monologues, accents, emotional states, languages, physicalities. Not as a theoretical exercise, but as a living practice you return to regularly.

Ask yourself concrete questions and answer them with action. What roles do I feel fluent in, and which ones make me tighten with unfamiliarity. What emotional terrains do I access quickly, and which require ritual or time? What accents or dialects do I claim as mine, and how often do I actually rehearse them out loud? What mannerisms or physical choices help me enter certain characters, and have I tested them enough to trust them? These are not theoretical inquiries but are the mechanics of professionalism. Skills that are not revisited dull quickly, and skills that are kept alive become muscle memory.

The goal is not to remove difficulty from auditions but to remove unnecessary chaos. When the tape arrives, you want your technical choices, your vocal facility, your emotional pathways to feel lived-in enough that they no longer demand your attention. Then, and only then, are you free to do the most important work: to listen, to imagine, to locate the heart of the character. Everything else should already be in your body, waiting for you.

III Ritual Is What Carries You When Confidence Cannot

By the time an audition arrives, confidence is an unreliable resource. It fluctuates wildly depending on how recently you’ve worked, how tired you are, how much rejection you’ve absorbed of late. What should not fluctuate is ritual. Ritual is the difference between hoping you’ll feel ready and knowing exactly how you’ll get there. It is the set of repeatable actions that tell your nervous system, we’ve done this before, even when your mind is panicking and your body feels unfamiliar. Actors who appear calm under pressure are rarely calmer people; they are simply better scaffolded.

• Containment. 

A useful audition ritual does not begin with the scene. It begins with containment. Decide, in advance, what the first hour of any audition process looks like, regardless of the role. Where do you read the sides for the first time? Do you read them aloud or silently? Do you stand or sit? What do you do with your phone? These decisions sound banal, but they matter because they reduce friction. Every choice you do not have to make under pressure preserves energy for the choices that actually belong to the character. Preparation is not about adding more, it is about subtracting uncertainty.

• Comprehension.

Before any emotional or imaginative work begins, the scene must be understood. Who is speaking? To whom? Under what circumstances? With what stakes? What changes by the end of the scene? This phase is deliberately unglamorous and should be kept clean. It is about clarity, not performance. Many actors rush through comprehension in their eagerness to “act,” only to discover later that their choices lack coherence. Understanding is the ground on which everything else stands.

• Exploration.

Only after the scene is understood should play begin. This is the messiest phase and often the most generative. Try choices you know are wrong. Speak the text too fast, too slow, too softly. Move when you think you shouldn’t. Allow yourself to discover what the scene resists as much as what it welcomes. This phase should feel private and unobserved, even if someone is reading with you. Exploration builds range and prevents your final choices from feeling brittle or obvious.

• Refinement. 

This is the time to commit to specificity. Choose what works and let go of the rest. Run the scene enough times that technical elements such as eyeline, framing, and breath begin to settle into the body. By the time you record, these details should feel automatic, leaving your attention free for listening and connection. 

Birdman (2014)

There should also be rituals that exist independently of any audition — daily or weekly practices that keep your instrument warm. Speaking text aloud every day, even briefly. Checking in with your voice, your breath, your body. Rehearsing accents you claim as yours so they do not live only in theory. Revisiting emotional states you know you’ll be asked for again and again. This is not about grinding; it is about familiarity. The body trusts what it has done recently. When these practices are maintained, the audition no longer feels like a performance out of nowhere, but a continuation of a conversation you are already in.

IV Refuse to Be Causal. 

Acting is not a neutral craft. It is one of the ways a society learns how to see itself. It is how we understand grief, love, and power. When actors are careless, when the work is rushed or hollow or underprepared, the stories flatten, and with them our understanding of what it means to be human.

This is why preparation matters. Not because it leads to bookings, though sometimes it does. But because every audition is a chance to practise seeing another life clearly and asking the audience to care about it. To make someone feel less alone. To give language and shape to emotions people struggle to name. That work deserves rigour. It deserves respect. It deserves actors who do not rely on talent alone, but who show up with seriousness, craft, and humility.

So if you are tired, or waiting, or wondering whether the effort is worth it, remember this: the world does not need lacklustre actors. It needs actors who are precise, generous, and alive to the weight of what they are doing. Actors who understand that how they prepare is inseparable from what they offer. Actors who refuse to be casual with something that has the power to move, to disrupt, to heal.