A Horrible Audition Mistake Cost Me a Booking Here's 1 Simple Solution

In this video, I'm going to be sharing with you one horrible audition mistake that I made, and when you watch it to the end, you'll see the easy one-fix solution. And I've got a special bonus for you at the very end. It's a great video, the 4 important and essential words you always want to say when turning down an audition or a job. Okay, let's get started. Hi, I'm Aaron Marcus, and welcome to the Actor and Model Quick Tips channel and the Actor Career Center, where I share the information that I've learned after working in the industry for 37+ years. And hopefully this information's gonna be really helpful to you. If you haven't done this yet, don't forget, click the subscribe button, the notification bell, so you always know when a new video has been uploaded. And if you like the video, give it a thumbs up. That's always really helpful. This is many years ago. I had a callback for a national television commercial. So this is a big deal. I drove about 6 or 7 hours for the initial audition, had the callback, drove back down again. And I don't want to give all the specific details, but let me tell you this. It was for a special hotel. And here's the scenario. My wife and I, the woman playing my wife, we are vacationing at this hotel. We are out on this beautiful balcony. We are overlooking the mountains. It's beautiful. We're celebrating. We have a glass of wine in one hand, and we are just taking in this love and excitement and this just special time period at the hotel. So as an actor, we're doing our lines, and it felt right to me in that moment to put my arm around the woman playing my wife. You know, we're just talking about how much we're in love, and it's great. It just felt right to me. And when I did that— What happened? All of a sudden, I could feel the other actor slightly pull away from me. I could feel her body kind of tensing up. Once again, I just had my arm around her shoulder, but for whatever reason, it was making her really, really uncomfortable. Now, I am incredibly distracted At this point because I'm feeling this tension and, you know, I'm delivering the lines, but I, I'm just— I'm out of the moment, completely out of the moment. We finished and I walked out of there and I just thought, okay, it's about, you know, 14 hours round trip. This is the second time I'm doing this because this was the callback. There's no way in the world I'm getting this job. It was all about the connection. It was all about the chemistry between the 2 people, and there was none. And I can tell you just a little bit of a side note. I was kind of thinking about asking the casting director if I could do it again with somebody else because it just felt so bad to me. But I figured if they thought that I was right with the way I was doing it, they maybe they would have asked me to stick around. And so I didn't, and I certainly couldn't say anything in front of the other actor. So I just walked out of there, and I felt bad on many different levels. I felt bad making this person feel uncomfortable. I felt bad that the audition— it's not an audition, this was callback. I've already done this once. Callback was horrible, and I knew I wasn't getting it. And this was a national TV spot. It would have been a lot of fun. It would have been very lucrative. So here's the solution, and here's my takeaway, and this is what I want to share with you. And like I said, this happened, I don't know, 15 years ago. I mean, it's a long time ago. And I know there's a lot more talk about this today than at that time period, but still, I started implementing this fix for every audition I did after that. So here's the solution: if for any reason in your particular scene you think that there's even a remote possibility that there could be some physical contact with another actor. What I do is ask ahead of time, even if it's not a callback, just the initial audition. They'll tell you who you're auditioning with, and I will make sure I walk over to the person and I ask if by some chance it feels right, because it's not written in the sides, it's not part of the the scene, you know, it's not written in there, but it just might feel right. If I think there's any chance, I'm going to ask the other actor, you know, hey, just wanted to check in. I don't know if it's going to happen, but, you know, would you be okay if I held your hand in the scene? Would you be okay if I put my arm, you know, around your waist? Would it be okay if I put my arm around your shoulder? And I don't necessarily just Listen for the answer. Because if you hear it like this, hey, I just want to find out, would it be okay if it feels right in the moment just to put my arm around your shoulder? If I hear something like, I don't know. Yeah, I mean, I guess that's okay. If I'm hearing anything like that, I'm not doing it. There's no way I'm doing it. Now if I hear, oh yeah, of course, yeah, that makes sense to me, okay, so then I'm in the ball game. And, and once again, I don't know that I am, but at least I can feel free to do that. On a little bit of a side note, I'm only going off on a little bit of a tangent here, but I think this is really helpful. For every audition that I have with somebody else, if, if there's a relationship involved in Anyway, I want to make sure that I spend a couple of minutes talking to that other actor. Now, I don't go in there and say, look, I know we're supposed to be husband and wife, so could you tell me something, you know, personal, you know, about your life so that I can feel more connected? Of course, you know, you're not going to want to do something like that, but I will strike up a conversation. I do want to find something out something about this person that I can connect with. And it might be something as simple as, hey, do you live in the area? Did you have to travel far? I was sent in by this agency. Do you work with the same agent by any chance? And then just start building something up just so I can feel some kind of connection with the other actor. And I can tell you I did that. And this, once again, I'm going back a lot of years, but this is a perfect example. When I had a recurring role on the Netflix show House of Cards, and I was the caretaker kind of slash butler of Ellen Burstyn, who played Robin Wright's mother. And this was a woman who I took care of for many, many years, and I knew— and I had about 3 or 4 scenes with her— I knew that I wanted to find a connection. I wanted to feel this warmth towards her. I wanted to protect her. I wanted to make sure that I did everything I could to help her because I really cared about her. And we spent a few meals together. And once again, I didn't say anything like, hey, I'm trying to figure out— we just talked. And I learned a lot about her life, a really interesting person. And by the way, if you've never If you're not familiar with Ellen Burstyn, check her out. I think she might have just turned— she's in the high 80s, something like that, years of age. She's an Academy Award-winning actor, really such an interesting person. Just loved hearing her story, and it made it so easy for me to just tap right into Feeling the emotions that I needed to. So always try, if you can, you know, strike up a conversation. And, you know, it doesn't have to be anything really super deep or, you know, heavily involved. Just find out something about the person's life that you can connect with for whatever reason that it makes sense for in this particular scene. But most importantly, ask. Always ask permission. Before you have any kind of physical contact with somebody. Now, just as a quick reminder, don't forget, if you haven't done this yet, click the subscribe button, the notification bell. If you like the video, give it a thumbs up. And I did promise I was going to share another bonus video with you, and this one is the 4 words you absolutely need to, to use if you're turning down an audition or a job. You can find it right up here, and you might just see like a little i. Sometimes the actual name pops out, or just put your mouse over it and the name should show up. Enjoy the video, and, and I'm curious if you ever had any experiences like this, which I hope you didn't. Uh, there was some technique that you used, something that you did at an audition that didn't work. Please share it with everybody here so we can learn from you as well. That's the whole point of the channel, having a place where actors can go to, to share information so we can help each other out. I'm Aaron Marcus, and I can't wait to talk with you again soon. See ya. See ya.