Aaron Marcus, an actor-model coach, walks through booking an NBC TV role: confirm availability with your agent, get the full script, memorize your lines by Monday despite getting sides Thursday or Friday, then attend hair and wardrobe fittings on Friday. He avoids researching co-actors to stay calm and highlights every line to ensure nothing is missed.
Hi, my name is Aaron Marcus, America's premier acting and commercial modeling career coach, the author of How to Become a Successful Commercial Model, now in its 5th edition, founder of howtomodel.com, and I've been making my living as an actor and a commercial model for over 26 years. This is a series of blog videos where I'm going to be talking about how I booked a job with an NBC show or on an NBC show, and this is video number 2. So after receiving an email, um, after my audition, which actually took a couple of weeks after the audition, from my agent stating that they wanted to check my availability for 3 days on this particular episode, first thing I did was I checked my calendar very quickly and was really happy to see that I was not booked out for those dates, which That would have been a problem. And I can tell you about that in another blog video of how to deal with those kinds of situations. But I noticed that I was free. And so I contacted the agent right away just to let her know. And she said, well, you're not booked officially yet. Looks like you're booked. They want you. They wanted to first find out if you were available. And then once the confirmation came in, One of the first things I asked for was, could I get the sides? The audition itself, it was all improvisational. And so I wanted to have the script sent to me so that way I could read the entire script and also see my sides in there as well and all my lines. So when I got it emailed to me, and you know, things are done a little bit differently today, they just sent a PDF of the entire script and it was about 60, I can't remember, like about 62, 68 pages. Instead of trying to print it out on my own. I forwarded it to a printer that I use and had them print it out. You know, it did cost some money to print out 68 pages, but it's— it looks better, and also it's less wear and tear on my personal printer. So the very first thing that I did was I read through the entire script. I wasn't just looking at my lines. I wanted to get a feel for what's going on here, who the characters were. I was looking at the names of the actors I wanted to see if there was anybody I was familiar with who I was having scenes with. And actually, one of the interesting things was one of the actors I did know about because I've seen her work for years and years and years and years on TV. She's very well known. I actually, for the other actors that I wasn't familiar with, I did not want to look them up. I did not want to go on IMDb, see what kind of work they'd done. Honestly, If they had done a lot of really incredible things, I thought it might make me more nervous to know about them. So I actually thought it was better not to know who they were and read through the entire script a couple of times. And I was just reading it from the audience's perspective, as if I were watching it on TV. And then, you know, after getting a pretty good feel of what was happening, then I went through, used my highlighter, went through my parts, very carefully just to make sure that I didn't miss any of my lines that I had to start memorizing, because I really didn't have very much time for this. I think I got my sides by Thursday, Friday, something like that, and then actually we start shooting Monday. So I really didn't have a whole lot of time to do that. So anyhow, I just want to tell you that was the next step of actually getting the booking, finding out the specific dates, They didn't have times for me at that point. And then the next step was going to a fitting, and I had to do that on Friday. So I must have gotten the sides on Thursday. And so the fitting was Friday, and there were 2 different types of fitting. One was I had to go to wardrobe and hair— I'm sorry, I had to go to hair and makeup for one, and the other one was to go to wardrobe. And even though I was going to bring some of my wardrobe, they also were bringing some, and we weren't sure whose wardrobe was going to be used. So I don't want to give out much information about the type of wardrobe because it was something unique, and the same for hair and makeup. There was something that was done, and I probably shouldn't say anything about it until after the episode airs. So anyhow, those were the first couple of steps after finding out that I was booked. And in the next video blog, I'll take you to the next step of what happened during the fittings and meeting with hair and makeup people. And I'll fill you in on more details at that point. So anyhow, if you have any questions at all, feel free. You can email me at aaron@howtomodel.com, or you can also always reach me on my Facebook page, which is facebook.com/aaronmarcus. facebook.com/howtomodel. Looking forward to talking with you soon. I'm Aaron Marcus.
