Aaron Marcus, a veteran actor and career coach, shares what to do if you're running late to an audition. Build a generous time buffer for traffic and parking. If you're late anyway, contact your agent immediately, not the casting director, and let them handle it.
Hi, my name is Aaron Marcus, America's premier acting and commercial modeling career coach, the founder of howtomodel.com. I'm the author of How to Become a Successful Commercial Model, now in its 5th edition, and I've been making my living as an actor and a commercial model for over 27 years. Uh, one of the real benefits of being a full-time actor and a commercial model is that I get a chance to Experience and share my experiences with you on a very regular basis. And I had a really interesting one, uh, pretty recently. And this deals with being late. And this holds true for both auditions, uh, or go-sees or jobs. And I guess the first thing I'd like to say is don't be late. You do not want to be late to any of those things. And the other thing that I wanted to say about it is The reality is sometimes there are things that are simply out of your control and you do the best you can and still you wind up being late. So, I mean, one of the things that I always do is I always give myself plenty of time, whether it's hitting traffic, not finding a parking place, getting lost. And so I build that into my time for reaching a job or an audition or a go-see. And I recently had an audition for a TV show in New York and I gave myself about an Almost an hour and a half, uh, just in case I hit some traffic. And as it turns out, uh, that's exactly what happened, and I arrived about 10 minutes later than I should have. And so for union auditions, you were given a very specific time slot. It's not like a go-see, the audition for models, where you can show up, you know, they'll tell you the go-see is taking place anytime between You know, 10 and 4, or 12 and 3, or 9 to 5. For an audition, for a union audition, you have to show up at a specific time, and I always arrive early just to help prepare myself. So for this particular audition, I was about 10 minutes late. And what you always, always, always want to do if you are running late is contact your agent. Do not call the casting director. Do not call a photographer if it's a job. Always call your agent. Let your agent handle things. So I texted the agent, let them know that I was running about 10 minutes late. Well, actually what happened was when I first arrived there, I hadn't contacted the agent yet because I was hoping I'd be there 10 minutes late, there'd be no problem. I'd walk in, do the audition, and leave. But since when I did arrive, they were apparently on a lunch break and I really didn't know what was going to happen, whether they were still going to be able to see me after the lunch break Or they might say to me, hey, I'm sorry you were late. Uh, we're going to be auditioning other, uh, characters, uh, other roles, and sorry you missed out. In which case I would have understood it, wouldn't have, you know, shown any kind of expression of, you know, disappointment or come on, can't you get me in? I would have just said, hey, look, I really apologize. It was out of my control. Uh, but thank you very much. And hopefully I'll see you soon. And so, As soon as I got there, I saw that I couldn't audition because nobody was there. I contacted the agent and I told the agent I would stick around, um, and just wait till they came back. And that's what I did. And when they did arrive, they said, oh, Aaron, you were supposed to be here a little bit earlier, right? And I said, yeah, I was about 10 minutes late. I really apologize. They said, no problem, come on in. And I read, the audition went well and everything worked out fine. So the key thing to remember is make sure you build so much extra time in so that even if you are running late, it's not going to be a problem. In this case, I mean, there are only so many hours that I can plan on for traffic. And the other thing is always contact your agent. Let your agent handle it. I'm Aaron Marcus. If you have any questions or if you've experienced anything around being late, I'd love to hear about it. And please share it with other people on my Facebook page. It's facebook.com/howtomodel. You can also share information on my website, howtomodel.com, and maybe you can help other people who either have dealt, you know, had to deal with this, or in the future, in case they run into a situation, maybe they will learn how to cope with it better as well through your experiences also. So anyhow, I look forward to talking with you soon. Thank you, Aaron.
