Does acting make you so nervous you want to puke?
It’s the morning of an audition and everything is going smoothly. Your coffee was the perfect temperature, you hit every green light on the drive to the lot and your favorite audition shirt—the one you wore to the last two bookings—hasn’t a wrinkle in sight. You’re filled with a glowing confidence (especially since it’s also a good hair day) and you aren’t the tiniest bit nervous. With a morning like this, you’re bound to have a perfect audition. Right…?
But what if you wake up late? What if you check your email to find that your health insurance bill never got paid and you’re about to get canceled? And what all of this causes you to spin out and now you’re feeling extra nervous and jittery and anxious…and maybe even a bit like you’re going to throw up?
Are you screwed?
Guess what!? You can still have an incredible audition.
Whether or not nerves come up is out of your control. Whether or not you let those nerves you feel derail you, however, is up to you. Read those last two sentences again.
When you decide that having nerves is a bad thing and wish them away, it’s the end of presence and that gorgeous spontaneity that makes scenes so exciting. Include and allow your nerves. Permit them. Call them anything but bad–call them energy. Call them moving particles. Feel them and lean in.
Take the pressure off yourself.. There’s no such thing as a “perfect” audition experience. Experiment with letting the stuff your day throws you become little gifts you can use to help you tell your story as a real, breathing, thinking human who has weird s*hit happen to them on big days.
Go get ‘em.
CLASS CLIP TRANSCRIPTION
This idea of having the perfect routine, the perfect morning ritual so that you can have the perfect audition, so that you can give the performance of a lifetime. And you’re going to have to do these sixteen things and feel a certain way and feel totally ready and released instead of how you might feel in your dressing-room, which is throwing up and like you can’t breathe. What happens when you’re in your dressing-room and you’re throwing up and you can’t breathe? You have to turn the focus on: I can’t breathe right now. What does that feel like? What is the feeling of not being able to breathe? I feel hot, my heart is racing, I just threw up. I taste that in my mouth.
Allowing—the most common thing that happens to actors that stops them in a big audition is that they get really nervous. Their body starts responding, you start having the atoms move around in a different way. It’s named as a negative experience, and then it’s pushed away. It’s pushed aside. And then the spinning out begins.
So, you know, the way in which we try to assign something to our experience of going through the world—and yes, sadness comes up and we should grieve and feel it fully—right, but I remember, what if you could truly go to the audition and get a flat tire, and spill your coffee all over yourself, and have the security be a dick to you as you drive through, and have it all be great. Have it all be IS. Guy was a dick! Cool. My heart’s racing, my palms are sweating: yes! Yes, and! Here we go! I can act through all of that. As long as I don’t try to push it away, cancel it out, you can redirect. You can reroute.
