AKTA INSIGHTS: WHAT ACTORS SHOULD DO WHEN THE WORK STOPS COMING

Writer: Takunda Muzondiwa

A New Years Resolution Guide for Actors Who Want to Enter 2026 Ready

I Days That Slip Through Your Hands

I miss the ease of summer. In summer, time spills. In winter, time congeals. It sits heavier in the body and demands to be handled. There is a deliberateness that winter demands. There are fewer hours of light and they must be spent on purpose or they disappear. 

I’ve been indoors so much that I have become uncomfortably acquainted with how easily a day can dissolve. I make a cup of tea. I sit down. I watch something I have already seen. I scroll until my eyes ache and the room goes dim around the edges. Suddenly it's evening and I feel both exhausted and constricted. I know the body requires a slower pace when the world darkens. And still, something in me wants more from the day than this. 

I keep thinking about time. About how often I say I do not have enough of it. How, in the busyness of summer I craved quiet stretches to watch films. To return to the plays I love. To practice without pressure. To follow a curiosity all the way through without it needing to produce anything immediately useful. Now the quiet has arrived, unannounced and a little rude, and I am faced with the question it always asks: what will you do with me? 

Because this is the season in which the industry goes still; emails slow, rooms close, decisions pause. It can feel like being left behind but winter should never be an empty time. It's preparation time. It is the time of laying down roots. It is the careful tending that makes growth possible later on. The fruit we reach for in spring is only sweet because of what was done when nothing seemed to be happening at all. 

Therefore, when the work quiets, when the auditions stop coming, when the days stretch wide and dim; how do we, as actors, stay close to the thing we love? How do we use this time not to punish ourselves but to deepen our craft, gently and deliberately, in preparation for what is coming next?  

II In Praise of the Personalised Library

Actors are often told to “read more plays” or “watch more films,” but rarely are we taught why this matters beyond vague notions of taste and inspiration. The real work is not in the consumption but in the collection. Building a personal, physical library of material that you have witnessed and been moved by in some way is critical preparation every actor must engage in.  

We rarely get to choose the audition material. But we are always choosing how quickly and how deeply we can understand its language. Our ability to recognise what kind of world we have entered; how it breathes, where its tension lives, what it asks of us, is not improvised on the day. It is learned through sustained repeated contact with good writing. 

Owning material changes your relationship to it. A printed play that sits on your shelf, marked up, folded open at scenes to return to, does something that a PDF never will. Our minds remember where moments live on a physical page. We can begin to track writers across works. We can begin to notice which structures invite us in and which ones shut us out. Over time, this builds discernment. It builds an understanding of what you like and what you are able to inhabit truthfully. 

This personal library also serves a second, equally vital function. When the opportunity does arrive to choose a monologue for an audition, a drama school application, a workshop, a showreel update—you are not starting from zero. You have a catalogue of characters and moments you know intimately. Pieces that you have lived with. Pieces that suit your instrument. Pieces that continue to move and challenge you. The time that would have been spent. The time that would have been spent scrambling to find something good enough for an audition can instead be spent making the performance undeniable. 

The point is not to hoard text. It's to build fluency and trust in your taste, your instincts, and your preparation. A well-curated library means that when the opportunity comes, you're not asking what can I perform? You’re asking which one should I choose? 

BABYLON (2022)

III Practising in the Absence of a Ticking Clock 

Actors often treat self tapes as a response as opposed to a practice. As something you do when an audition arrives, under time pressure and with stakes attached. This would be unthinkable in any other discipline. A musician does not only pick up their instrument on performance days. A dancer does not only rehearse when booked. And yet actors routinely encounter the camera, a specific and demanding partner, having barely spent time with it at all. 

You must master what you do repeatedly. Not occasionally. Not urgently. Repetition builds ease, and ease creates freedom. 

Practising taping when nothing is on the line changes your relationship to the camera entirely. You begin to understand what feels alive versus what feels performative. The camera is ruthlessly honest so we should film tapes often and observe. Watch your tapes back analytically and ask precise questions. Where do my thoughts drop? When do I stop listening? What happens to my body when I am unsure? Over time, patterns will reveal themselves. This is invaluable information. 

Make use of the material in your personal library. Tape the same scene multiple times across weeks. Notice what deepens. Notice what simplifies. Improvement in acting is rarely about adding more: it’s about removing interference. Regular taping teaches you how little you actually need to do. Practising self tapes in quiet periods is not about being productive but is about staying fluent. So that when the moment comes, the camera isn’t a stranger, it's an old collaborator, and you know exactly how to meet it. 

IV Where Confidence Quietly Leaks Out

There is a particular temptation in quiet periods to expand. To add skills. To become more impressive on paper. But often the more impactful work is contraction. Reducing leakage. Strengthening the weakest link in the chain. Casting rarely rejects actors for the skill that they cannot do at all. They reject actors for the things they can almost do but not quite nail. 

The technical gap that distracts from an otherwise compelling performance should be given attention. 

Remember, practice makes professional

Winter is the time to choose one of these gaps and tend to it with care. Not everything. One thing. Something concrete. A General American accent that drifts under pressure. A regional dialect you keep receiving auditions for but still feel uncertain about. A physical requirement: skating, dancing, movement confidence. This is not about becoming something new but about becoming something cleaner. 

Work on it daily but modestly. 20 focussed minutes are often more transformative than an hour of vague effort once a year. Repetition creates reliability. The goal is not perfection; it’s removing friction so that when you’re acting, nothing pulls focus from the life of the scene. This kind of work is deeply unglamorous. Hardly anyone sees it. No one applauds it. But it accumulates. And accumulation is what winter does best. 

V The Quiet Work Makes You Impossible to Miss

Winter asks us to be honest about time. About how easily it disappears. About how much of it we’ve been wishing away, waiting for permission to begin. When the days grow dim and the industry grows quiet, there is a choice to be made: to numb the hours, or handle them. Gathering material. Practicing taping. Strengthening one weak link. None of this is about partaking in a harmful hustle culture or proving worth. It is about staying in a relationship with the work. About keeping the craft warm when there is no external heat.  

Time congeals in winter so it can be shaped. Held. Used with intention. And if we do the quiet work when no one is watching, when the light does finally return, we won’t be scrambling to catch up. 

We’ll be ready.