A Quote by Annaleigh Ashford

There's no better gift to an actor than when you walk into an audition, and the casting director is your partner. — © Annaleigh Ashford
There's no better gift to an actor than when you walk into an audition, and the casting director is your partner.
As an actor, when you walk into a room to audition, you get five minutes with a casting director, who doesn't even look at you, most of the time.
As an actor, you do feel very powerless... you are at the whim of the agent who submits you for a project, and then at the audition, you are at the whim of the casting director who will cast you or not.
I had this one audition - I won't say the casting director's name, but she was on the phone the whole time I sang. I was literally doing my audition, and she was on the phone. So I guess whatever it is she was ordering for lunch was more important than the high C's I was belting out.
Allison Jones, a big casting director out there, was like, 'They're casting 'The Daily Show' right now - you should submit a tape.' I remember leaving school to go shoot an audition.
I've actually been given a great gift. When I walk into an audition with a director, I'm carrying no baggage. They haven't seen me in anything, even though I've done nine films.
There's a lot to be said for being in a room with a casting agent or a director. There are things you can't really replicate when you're self-taping and there's the bonus of having someone to direct you, which is extremely helpful. The benefit of self-taping is, I suppose, being on your own clock. It's certainly more relaxing to self-tape than to audition with someone in the flesh but I don't know if it's necessarily better.
A bad audition is usually the director's fault, not the actor's. It's up to the director to get the atmosphere right to get the best out of your auditionees.
I was in a TV show called 'Lucky' on FX. The casting director from 'Lucky' was casting 'Dragon Wars'. She called me in to meet with the producer and audition, and I got it from there.
Even when you're casting, casting is always one of the weirdest subjective areas. You can get a group of people who would decide and say, "This person is a great actor and this person is less than a great actor," but there will always be somebody else who likes that person better than you based on their experience in their other films.
If you're going to go to an audition, you don't want to go in trying to force yourself into some archetype that has been thought up by a director and translated by a casting director.
Where having been an actor was extremely helpful to me was in casting. That's where I think a director who has acted can really shine, and casting is the most important thing you do.
I've had a couple opportunities where I've been on the other side of the audition process as a director, so it's really reassuring to me that it's just about who is right for that role and less about if you ace the audition. It's just about getting to know people, not about who's a better actor a lot of the time.
I had no idea that, when you audition for television or movies, you go to a big building - like, an office building - and you walk in the room, and everybody, I assumed, was smarter than me and better than me, and there's actors you recognize. I once fainted at an audition.
Finally, I was called for "The Office" and I was really lucky, because a lot of the shows that I went out for I would work my way up from, like, an audition with the casting director to the director to the producers to the studio, I'd go through seven auditions, and then they'd give the role to a famous actress.
When you audition for shows in Hollywood, you go in, you do your scene, maybe you get an adjustment. It's sort of easy, and a lot of times it just feels sort of rote and simple. Whereas when you go to New York and you audition for plays, you walk out sweaty and intimidated and nervous and doubting yourself as an actor.
As a director, it became important to hear that specific role read by that specific actor, and you hear the chemistry, or you don't hear the chemistry. So I'm not so bothered by the audition process anymore; in fact, I use it. It's a time for the actor to actually get to the know the director and the producers a little bit, too.
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