AKTA INSIGHTS: HOW TO TURN SMALL ROLES INTO BIG OPPORTUNITIES

Writer: Takunda Muzondiwa

1. I Borrow Other People’s Spotlights to Keep My Own Dream Warm 

It is awards season. The Hollywood Reporter’s YouTube channel watches its view count quietly quadruple as I do what I do every year: indulge myself on digitised Roundtables, clipped speeches, and softly lit conversations between actors who have made it to the shimmering “other side.” It is my day off from the cafe. I am still in my pyjamas. In the background, Alexander Skarsgård and Stellan Skarsgård discuss nepotism and the cruelty of directors. Their voices blur into the ambience. I catch my reflection in the microwave door, then run to the bathroom mirror. I practice an acceptance speech for an Oscar that does not yet have my name on it. I reach a flow state. Somewhere between embarrassment and belief, I feel a familiar ache bloom in my chest. If only, I think. If only I could land the one role where I could really show them. If only I could prove that greatness resides in this body, too. 

What moves me most, in this annual binge of interviews and Roundtable talks with some of the industry’s most compelling storytellers, is the recurring myth of the “small role”. Again and again, there is a story of a part so brief it could be missed if you blinked. A handful of lines. A single scene. Sometimes just a look. And yet these moments are spoken of as turning points. 

As early-career actors, we know how brutal the fight is for space: for the starring role, for anything more than five lines and a name. But these stories ask us to consider a different axis of ambition. They suggest that a career is not only built by scale, but by density. That presence is not proportional to screen time. 

So perhaps the real question is not how do I land the biggest role? But how do I make myself undeniable in the margins? How do I pack life, colour, and humanity into the smallest of roles? How do I treat each role not as a placeholder for the roles I want, but as a rehearsal for the artist I am becoming? This article is about that. About the long game. About borrowing light wherever it spills and letting it remind you of the temperature of your own dream. 

2. “There Are No Small Roles, Only Small Actors” and Other Sayings I Used to Roll My Eyes At

For a long time, I despised that phrase. There are no small roles, only small actors. It felt smug, sanctimonious, like something said only by people who had the luxury of retrospect. It is the kind of thing printed on drama school walls and lobbed at you after being cast as tree no. 3 in a school play. 

When you are trying to pay rent, always getting a recall but never the job, and being told it will happen soon, being told there are “no small roles” can feel less like wisdom and more like gaslighting. I used to roll my eyes at it hard. I thought it ignored power, access, and the very mathematics of visibility that governs this industry. I thought it was a way of asking actors to make peace with crumbs. 

Recently, I have begun to notice that the actors whose careers fascinate me the most do not speak nostalgically about the size of their early roles, but about the quality of their attention inside them. They talked about showing up as if the part mattered, even when no one else was watching. Meryl Streep debuted on film not with a monumental role but with a fleeting presence in Julia (1977), directed by Fred Ziennman. In the harsh economics of screen time, her appearance as Anne-Marie lasts barely a minute and was edited down even further in the final cut. At the time, Streep, herself baffled by the experience, admitted to briefly questioning her choice to pursue film at all. 

What I find most remarkable about this brief scene is that it was Streep’s introduction to the language of film and to the people who would shape her path. Jane Fonda, the film’s lead, was reported to have been impressed by the young actress’s instinctive attention to detail and encouraged her to improvise small nuances in performance. 

This example, whilst humble on the surface, was formative in impact. It helps undo the binary thinking that haunts many early-career actors: “This role matters because it’s big,” versus “This role doesn’t matter because it’s small.” Streep’s experience suggests a third possibility: that the value of a role is partly in how you use it,  in the degree to which you bring curiosity, generosity, and precision to what is ostensibly a tiny space.

If there’s a practical takeaway here for actors, it is this: the container of your role, big or small, isn’t the constraint. Your attention is the content. When you show up prepared not just with lines, but with presence, your contribution becomes more than a credit; it becomes a reference point, someone else’s memory of what it feels like to be with you in the scene. And that, more than anything else, is the currency of opportunities to come.

Julia (1977)

3. You Never Know Who You’re Standing Next To While You’re Waiting for Your Cue

One of the great unspoken truths about acting is that many small roles are accepted not because they advance your profile, but because they speak to your taste. You say yes because the writing is alive. Because the director has an eye. Because something in the world of the piece feels precise, risky, or strange in a way that makes you sit up. This kind of yes is not strategic in the obvious sense. It does not always come with money, prestige or leverage. But it comes with something more enduring: proximity to people who care deeply about the work. 

I sometimes wonder how many actors crossed paths with a young Christopher Nolan when he was scraping together short films on borrowed equipment, or a pre-Lady Bird Gerwig was writing and starring in small, unruly indies, or Jordan Peele before Get Out sharpened the cultural lens through which so many of us now see. I wonder how many projects were declined because they felt too small, too messy, too uncertain to be worth the time. And I wonder whether any of those actors, years later, recognise the names now etched into film history and feel a flicker of recognition and perhaps awareness. Awareness that the beginnings of seismic work are almost always modest, imperfect, and easy to underestimate. 

There is something profoundly hopeful about this, if we let it be. To be a creative person is to move through the world surrounded by future culture makers in their larval stages. At any given moment, we are likely sharing space with someone who will go on to shape conversations, spark social change, or make a film that causes a little girl in a dark cinema to cry and quietly decide she wants to become an actor too. You don’t know who it will be. You don’t know which project will grow teeth. But you are there. Your presence, your generosity, and your commitment are part of the ecosystem that allows those futures to happen.

Small roles are connected to big opportunities not only because they showcase your craft, but because they embed you in communities of care and ambition. They ask you to look up from your own scarcity long enough to recognise the richness of the room you’re already in. When we say yes to work we believe in, when we lend our bodies, voices, and attention to stories that matter to us, we are not wasting time. We are being placed in the current of becoming. And sometimes, that current carries us further than any spotlight ever could.

4. The Gift of Wanting Something This Much 

Acting is an appetite. It is the hunger to tell the truth with your whole self. Every small role, every brief appearance, every moment in which we are asked to enter a world and believe it fully is a chance to deepen that muscle. The actor who survives these early years does not wait for permission to be serious. We must decide, again and again, to build something sturdy where something disposable was expected. To act not because the role is big, but because acting is the thing we are unwilling to do halfway.

There is also this, which we do not say often enough: how rare it is to want something at all. To wake up with a pull in the body, a restlessness that has a direction. So many people move through their lives numbed by uncertainty or dulled by resignation, unsure of what they love or why they are here, and we, actors, have been spared that particular poverty. We have been moved by something. Chosen by it, even. That kind of desire is not trivial; it is a form of luck, and like all luck, it is fragile. It can be eroded by cynicism, by comparison, by the quiet violence of doing work carelessly because we believe it does not matter. This wanting must be protected, rehearsed, treated with reverence, or it calcifies into apathy. And that is why no role can afford to be small. Because every time we meet the work halfway, we risk teaching ourselves not to want so deeply again.