HOW TO GET MORE AUDITIONS

Writer: Takunda Muzondiwa

I The Mirage of the Overflowing Inbox

There are many ways in which my writing of this blog has come to feel confessional. A confession of my obsessive inbox refreshing. My Alice-like descents into rabbit hole forums for tips from others who have come to mistake their scarcity of booking for proof of their failures. I am a ritualistic person. It often begins with opening my email, refreshing, waiting, refreshing again, as if the clicking might summon an audition from the ether. The silence of the inbox becomes its own indictment: if I were good enough, wouldn’t there be something reaching out to me? I find that the myth of the working actor is often told in plural; auditions stacking up like unopened letters, self-tapes pouring in so fast you hardly have time to change your shirt. In this telling, the measure of your worth is in volume: more auditions, more progress. Fewer auditions, irrelevance.

It is a dangerous arithmetic, this calculation of opportunity as self worth. And yet it is the most common question I hear from actors standing at the threshold of the industry: How do I get more auditions? Where do I find them if I don’t have an agent? And if I do have one, how do I make sure they are working hard enough on my behalf? Beneath the phrasing sits the deeper fear: Will I ever be seen? 

If there is one thing I am coming to realise about how the pursuit of acting is sustained, it is that auditions are not oxygen. You can survive without them. What you cannot survive without — what no actor can afford to neglect — is the work that makes you skilful at the craft. 

II The Agent Is Not the Engine

There is a pedestal that needs to be dismantled for the early career actor. For those without an agent, the absence feels like exclusion from the machinery of the industry. For those with an agent, the relationship can calcify into a quiet resentment: Why aren’t they getting me more? Why aren’t they opening bigger doors? The danger in both positions is the same: to believe that your career rests entirely in the hands of someone else.

An agent is not the engine of your career. They are a valve, not an oxygen tank. Their role is to channel what you have already made combustible. If the work inside you is not aflame, there is nothing for them to release. Too many actors confuse access with momentum, as though being submitted is itself a sign of vitality. But momentum belongs to you. It lives in your rehearsal, your practice, the scenes you carve out in cramped kitchens or over Zoom with a friend who believes in you. To lay the entirety of your future at the feet of an agent is to confuse administration with artistry.

This is not to diminish their importance. Representation matters. But representation is only as powerful as who it represents. The question, then, is not whether your agent is doing enough, but whether you are.

III Cannibals in the Forums, and the Allure of Scrap Knowledge

In the absence of auditions, actors gather in cavities. Subreddits, Discord channels, Facebook groups and online forums. Here, I too have gorged. On scraps that get exchanged like contraband: rumors of a Netflix open call, whispers of a casting director's email, screenshots of breakdowns with the confidential watermark still visible. There is tenderness here, make no mistake. Actors caring for one another in the dark, sharing crumbs so no one starves entirely. There is solidarity in the scavenging. But there is also danger. These spaces can become echo chambers of scarcity, where the hunger itself becomes contagious. You scroll, you compare, you calculate your failures against someone else’s fortune. You collect tips like relics, convinced that one more scrap of information will tilt the scale in your favor. It is a form of cannibalism, though gentle in its violence. We feed on each other’s despair, mistaking the act of searching for the act of becoming.

The truth is brutal: no amount of scrolling will substitute for practice. A list of auditions cannot make you more ready when one finally arrives. The forums are comfort, not cure. To confuse the two is to mistake noise for nourishment. If auditions are the exam, then the month leading up to it must be filled with study. And here is where the metaphor must cut deeper: you cannot cram for this kind of test. The actor who waits until a self tape request arrives to begin preparing is already too late. Discipline is not a virtue here; it is survival. In discussing the topic of this blog my colleague said something that split me open: “track your input, not your output”. Hours in practice. That is the metric that matters. Not how many auditions were granted, but how ready you are when one stumbles into your inbox.

La La Land (2016)

V The Courage To Be Seen Before You Are Ready

If you trace the beginnings of so many careers, you will not only find a neat list of agent-submitted auditions. You will also find a play in a tiny theatre that drew a critic on an off night. You will find a workshop where a casting assistant happened to sit in the back row. You will find a scrappy web series filmed on borrowed equipment that revealed timing too precise to ignore. These are not anomalies. I have to believe that they are the natural consequence of determined excellence being witnessed. The industry, for all its machinery, runs on people. People need to be moved. To be inspired. And to inspire, you first must show up. We are so often paralysed by the fear of being seen, before we are who we want to be. We rehearse in isolation, tape in isolation, and build our process sealed inside our rooms. Then we tell ourselves an all too comforting lie: when the audition comes, I’ll rise to the occasion.

But pressure does not transform what you have not rehearsed; it magnifies it. To imagine that you will magically become the actor you aspire to be in the exact moment it matters most is not confidence, it is self sabotage. What we fear is exposure. Exposure does not only reveal us to others; it reveals us to ourselves. To practice in the company of others, to show the rough edges of our craft, is to risk being confronted with inadequacies we would rather overlook: our wavering discipline, our tendency to hide in comfort zones, our all too human impulse to polish the easy skill while avoiding the harder work of deep listening. It is safer, always, to rehearse alone, where no one can interrupt the fantasy that we are already enough. But to remain unseen is to remain untested. And untested actors do not grow.

This is the heart of the trap: we treat acting as if it were a solitary craft, something to be perfected in private. We pour hours into accents, posture, gesture, but the real test of acting has never been the display of acquired skills. It is whether you can draw an audience closer, move them to empathy, allow them to glimpse themselves in the body of another. That can only be practiced with people — through the live friction of listening and responding, through the unpredictable presence of another human being. Great actors are not simply masters of technique; they are translators of conflict. They reveal the quiet wars inside a character while simultaneously negotiating the external conflicts of the world around them. This cannot be learned in isolation. It requires practice in dialogue, in exchange, in collision with others. To avoid being seen before you are ready is to avoid the very arena where acting is born: the space between people.

So the challenge is not merely to share your work to impress, but to share it so that you may be sharpened. Read scenes aloud with friends. Ask for feedback, not to feed the ego but to expose the gaps you cannot see alone. Volunteer for readings, small plays, workshops, not to chase opportunity but to train your own nerve to hold steady under witness. Embarrassment is not proof of inadequacy; it is proof you are practicing in the right place. Because in the end, the discipline that will sustain you is not mastery of accents or gestures, (though the importance of those things is not to be diminished) but the mastery of being present, porous, available to respond. And that can only be forged in the company of others. To be seen before you are ready is not humiliation. It is rehearsal for the only truth this craft has ever required: that acting is never a solo act.

VI Cathedrals of Discipline, Built Brick by Invisible Brick

The most difficult lesson is this: progress in acting is rarely visible in real time. You try. For months, and nothing changes. No calls, no callbacks, no doors. It feels like building a cathedral brick by brick, only to stand back and see no structure rising. But time is deceptive. The work compounds in silence. Then one day, without warning, a tape lands, and what emerges is not the actor you were three months ago but the one you built quietly, invisibly, when no one was watching.

Auditions are not proof of progress. Input is. The gym teaches us this in ways the industry does not. You lift, you sweat, you eat, and at first nothing happens. Then, gradually, imperceptibly, the body shifts. Acting is the same. The hours you pour into your voice, your movement, your breath, your scene work — these are the calories, the reps, the bricks. You may not see them stack day by day, but they are stacking all the same. Patience here is not passivity. It is an active discipline, the refusal to mistake silence for failure. The refusal to believe that the absence of an audition is the absence of worth.

VII Too Good to Ignore, Too Ready to Be Denied

So how do you find auditions without an agent? You search. You network. You make your own work. But more than anything, you prepare as if the audition were already in your inbox. Because when it finally does arrive — and it will — your readiness is the thing within your control. What will carry you is not the rumour you found on a forum, not the email you sent at midnight, not even the submission your agent slid onto a casting director’s desk. What will carry you is the work you poured into yourself.

Auditions are not oxygen. They are weather. They come, they go, they shift with seasons you cannot control. Your skill set as an actor is yours alone to build. And if you build it with hunger, rigour and tenderness, then when the storm does break, you will not merely survive it. You will be the one it was always meant to find.