A Professional Actor Resume: Everything Explained

Professional Actor Resume: Part I

First of all, you should know that an acting resume must follow a certain format. It’s important to remember that the people who will be reading your résumé (casting directors and agents) have three things in common that you need to be aware of when preparing it:

1. They are very, very busy.
2. They get tons of mail from actors every single day, much of which they might not even open for several days if sometimes not longer.
3. Because they are so busy, when they do look at an actor’s résumé, they look for specific things right away and they want to be able to find them in a standardized format. Making them look for the information they are interested in learning about you, could mean getting your résumé trashed.

Professional Actor Resume: Part II

Below you will find an example of an acting résumé, which I will comment on about its different sections.

Let’s take note of a few things:

1. Below I will direct you to see some examples. Just be aware that actor resume format can change slightly between NY and LA for example. The main things to remember though are as follows:

2. Make sure that the contact information (phone number and e-mail address) are up to date. Make sure you have an answering machine hooked up to be able to receive messages from the people you want to contact you. If they miss you once, they might not call back.

3. Your personal data should be listed at the top of the page. I don’t think it matters much whether it is listed vertically or horizontally, but if you don’t have much space, then I would imagine it would better doing it horizontally.

4. Don’t give your age, but your age range. If you are not sure, ask around to people you know. More than your actual age, people in this industry are more interested in the ages you can play.

Professional Actor Resume: Part III

5. Your primary interest in either Film acting, Television, Theatre, Industrials, On-Camera Commercials will determine the order in which you list your categories. Your most important ones, or rather, the ones you want to draw the most attention to should be listed first in order.

6. In actor resumes you will see that there are three columns in each section.

a. Column 1 - The name of the project
b. Column 2 - The role you played (name of character and type of role; i.e. principle, lead, supporting, feature, etc.) In theory, casting directors don’t like to see background roles on your résumé.
c. Column 3- The name of the director, theatre or company that produced the work. This is a very important column. It is my understanding that a smaller, less important role in a project produced by a reputable theatre company or directed by a big name could weigh much more with a casting director than seeing that you had the lead in a small project that was produced by a lesser known company.

7. New actors don’t always have lots of things to put on their professional actor resume. Going back to what we talked about earlier, training is important. Anyone who is serious about becoming an actor knows that and casting directors and agents know that too. Having some good an on-going training on your résumé is a good thing and is a chance for you to show to anyone that looks at it, that even though you might not have the best credits yet, at least you are trying your best to become the best actor you can be. Once again, just like in the third column, training at reputable institutions with reputable teachers can also get you points. Certain schools and teachers are known to turn out good, solid talent.

Professional Actor Resume: Part IV

8. Industrials, On-Camera Commercials and Commercial print section. Here you only list the types of projects as you see below. Never put in the name of the company you did the work for. The reason for this is that since you neither put the dates down on which you did the projects (advertising for example) nor the conditions of the contract (some companies say that you if you do a commercial for them for example, that you can’t work for the competition for x number of years after that), whoever is reading your résumé could jump to conclusions and rule you out of a project, because they don’t want to pick up the phone and check with you first. You can avoid that by sticking with the industry standard and just saying that if they want to know who you did some advertising work for, they can ask you for your list. That’s perfectly normal.

Professional Actor Resume: Part V

9. Special skills section. This is important for lots of different types of acting work. Commercial casting directors are particularly interested in this section as they get requests all the time for on-camera commercials especially, for actors with special skills. In down times or periods when you are not doing much acting work, it could be a good time to take a class to learn a new skill to add to your résumé.

10. Never lie! Always tell the truth. Lying will only catch up to you. If you are not a skilled actor yet, when you go into an audition or even an interview with a talent agent, you will already have enough things to think about without having to worry about what you have to say about the lie you told on your résumé if they ask. Just tell the truth. It’s better.

Professional Actor Resume: Part VI

Sample Actor Resumes

http://www.jobbankusa.com/resumewrite/ResumeTemplates/actor_actress_resume_template.html

The absolute best resource in my opinion is Brian O'Neil's book Acting As A Business: Strategies For Success. It gives you different resume examples. Go visit Brian's website for more information on how to put together a professional actor resume as well as on classes and personal consultations in NY and LA.

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