Acting Careers: Acting Resume 101: Acting Career Context

An acting resume is a little bit trickier than your average resume. It has to do all of the things that an ordinary resume does, but it also has to really integrate the different types of situations and evaluations that an actor experiences. This article will discuss the aspects of a successful acting career and talk about how to address those in an acting resume for maximum impact.

An Acting Career Is A Part Of A Landscape

The social landscape of the theatre, film, and television scenes varies pretty widely based on your geographical location. Likewise, there are infinite possible configurations of looks, abilities, and motivations that can drive your acting career in any number of directions. For this reason, it would be a fruitless endeavor to attempt to delineate a typology of acting careers and try to provide specific directions. All that can be provided are tools for self-analysis, and for surveying your options from a professional perspective in order to make the choices that will ultimately precipitate the type of career that you hope to have.

How To Start An Acting Career Like You Would Start A Business

As an actor, you must be not only an artist but also an entrepreneur. When it comes down to it, you are providing a service that people either need or want, and if they don’t need or want the services you are putting up on offer, then you can still be an artist but you won’t make any money at it and likely will feel pretty unhappy that people seem to not appreciate your art. So your first step in being an actor/entrepreneur is to figure out what people in your market actually want. And there’s a very easy way to do it: just look around to see what people are paying for.

Acting Career Information: The Stakeout

Next, you can gauge demand for particular niches by trying to understand how many actors are being paid to do each type of work. In most locations, paid theatre work is pretty exclusive and has a high barrier to entry. You have to already be fairly well-known to get those jobs, and the way you get that well known is generally by acting for little or no money in off-broadway or storefront theatre settings. You will find a lot of fun and artistic fulfillment doing these things, but, as I said, little or no money. As an artist, you will probably want to experience this type of artistic fulfillment, but our goal here is simply to help you make money as an actor so we will ignore this option for our purposes. In your own life, you will of course way the pros and cons of each job in terms of the time you have available, the money that you need, and the level of artistic drive that currently demands to be satisfied.

Acting Jobs Are In This Cities

It almost goes without saying, but I will mention here, that if you want to succeed as a professional actor you must live in a major metropolitan area. There’s simply no market for actors anywhere else. There might be occasional exceptions to this, but I doubt you want to stake your entire career on such a slim chance. New York, Chicago, Los Angeles. Those are the big three. There’s some TV and voice-over work in Orlando and Miami, but really you’re better off in one of the big three. New York is great for musical theatre and dance, Chicago is better for straight theatre and comedy and has a pretty good film scene, and Los Angeles is the best choice for television acting and also good for film.

Resumes For A Career As An Actor

Now, finally to the resumes. The resumes that you write will have to be flexible and to directly reflect the desires of your intended audience. That’s the people auditioning you, not the people you hope will be watching you on stage or on screen. That means you may have to tweak your acting resume every single time you send it out. Be smart about this; you don’t want to spend all your time working on your resume, and you really won’t have to. Just put a little bit of thought into what you choose to include in the resume before you send it out.

Start An Acting Career Resume Like This

An acting resume format must be exactly one side of one page. After a few years of working as an actor, you’ll probably have more than that, so you’ll have to be selective. Some experience might be just plain impressive and so you’ll include it regardless of how relevant it is to the role you’re currently auditioning for. Other professional acting experiences might be a little more specialized, or may even detract from your other experience. You have to think about the types of experiences that paint a picture of you as a great candidate for this specific role, and tweak your resume to target that. I recommend compiling and maintaining one absolutely complete version of your resume that is as many pages as it needs to be, and then all you’ll have to do to prepare a resume for a particular audition is to remove all irrelevant experience, special skills, etc. until you have one good page that makes you look perfect for the part.

Acting Careers Are Flexible (And You Can Too)

Even the sections that you use in your actors resume might be altered to reflect the needs of the audition. For example, some folks have criticized our example actor’s resume because it uses separate sections for musical theatre experience and straight theatre experience. Personally, I think that separating these two sections highlights versatility and emphasizes that you as an actor have experience in both areas of theatre. If you were auditioning for a part on a TV show, you probably would want to merge these sections because the auditioners simply won’t care and to them it will make the resume more difficult to interpret by unnecessarily complicating your professional experience. You have to think like the people who will be reading your acting resume in order to make the resume the most appropriate and adapted that it can be.