How and Why to Typecast Yourself

The Best Demo Skit Ever

So you’re an actor now.

Step one: say that. Don’t say “I’m learning to act” (you’ll be learning for the rest of your life). Don’t say “I want to act” (you’ll be “wanting to” for the rest of your life). Worst of all, don’t say “I’d like to act” (someone will happily recruit you to work on their student film for free, and the film will be bad, and you won’t get any business from it, you won’t even get good reel material). Hollywood is an industry that you have to break into, via either brute force or subterfuge. When you’re starting out, everybody else is uncertain about you, so if you’re also uncertain about yourself you’re bound to get passed over, because no one is vouching for you. So you need to vouch for yourself. When someone asks you what you do, you say that you’re an Actor (or Actress). You act, and you’re good at it.

And you should be good at it. You should be taking classes, you should be reading lines every day, you should be digging into the various acting theories, brushing up on your philosophy, getting your improv training, attending group readings. Acting is very much a learnable skill, and you should be quickly reaching the point where slipping into a particular role is not only seamless, it’s almost boring.

And you should regularly be applying for roles. But what roles do you apply for?

Why You Need to Typecast Yourself

You can be the best actor ever, you can spend decades honing your craft, and you will still get 0 good parts at the end of it all. Why? Because there are two other problems standing in the way of you actually getting the good parts:

1. No one knows who you are.

2. No one cares.

You see, despite the fact that we really are in the ultimate and most artistic form of the Communications Industry, all of the decision makers here (me included) are actually very closed-off people. Specifically with regard to our casting processes. Casting processes vary greatly, but they generally all have a similar rhythm and timeline, so I’ll give an example of that.

The Casting Process (from the Perspective of the CD)

1. Actually, I changed my mind. I’m not a CD, I’m the Director. This an ultra-low budget feature, paid but non-union, and I’ve decided that instead of wasting my money on a CD, I’m going to waste my time actually filtering through all the applications myself. This does happen, rarely, and usually it’s a sign that the Director is a PITA, which I am.

2. I have a supporting role, in this feature, that I need filled. A character that I need played. I know the character (they’re an imaginary person that exists only in my head and on the script, I know them very well because I am making them up), but I don’t know who’s eventually going to play them. So what I’m going to do is take every application and audition that I receive, from every actor that is interested, and compare it to the delusion that I have in my head of this imaginary person. The better the fit, the more interested I’ll be. In total, the three criteria that I’m going to be judging you by are 1) “does this person look and act like my fantasy of the character?”, 2) “does this person seem like they’ll be an HR problem on set in any way at all?”, and 3) “are they cheap?”. Those are the questions I’m trying to answer, that’s the pick-2 triangle I’m dealing with.

3. The first thing I’m going to do actually has nothing to do with you, and if I’m lucky, it will allow me to avoid having to deal with you at all. The first thing I’m going to do is call/text all of my friends in the industry, everyone and anyone I know who might know someone who they can vouch for, and any actors that I’ve worked with in the past who were good and who might be a fit. I’m going to use the network I already have before I even think about trying to find someone online.

4. Whelp, sucks for me. I knew a couple people who would have been good for this role, but they’re all booked/on vacation/their dog ate their acting career/whatever. None of my friends had anyone available, I’m still out one supporting cast-member. That’s okay though, because I have a fallback before Craigslist and Facebook groups: talent agencies. Their bureaucracy annoys my neurotic, hyper-aggressive, control-freak self to no end, and my producer would really rather not negotiate rates with an agent for a project like this, but at least we’ll know that whoever we end up hiring was serious enough about their acting career to get represented. Hopefully they’ll limit the amount of drugs they do on set.

5. Heyman says they’ll get back to me, and this is where your first chance at this role appears. While I’m waiting on them and whomever else I called, I’ll finally bite the bullet and put up listings on Actor’s Access, Ohio Casting, and probably some Facebook groups (Because really, why not? It’s not going to cause any more of a headache than I already have.). So, just like with jobs, roommate searches, and Facebook marketplace, by the time you see the posting on the website, the person posting it has already tried every other option, and is also actively negotiating with other parties not present to try and find a better and more trustworthy option than you.

6. Except actually, I’m not considering you at all, because all you did was submit a headshot and resume (creative writing sample) to AA, and I checked the box that filters out every submission that doesn’t have a video attached. So I never even saw you, and you didn’t make it into the first round.

Now why didn’t you submit video? Maybe you’re lazy. More likely, you don’t have any video that’s worth submitting. You might have footage from some random student film you did a couple years ago, but you read the description for this role and you knew that the character you played in that film is completely different from the character I’m looking for, and you felt that there wasn’t much point in submitting irrelevant material (you were right, thank you for saving me a couple clicks, most applicants just submit the irrelevant nonsense anyways and then I have to filter it). You submitted out of confused desperation, hoping that the lottery ticket chance that you were giving yourself was worth the time it took to click upload. It wasn’t.

So let’s review.

None of your skills matter until we see them, and we don’t want to have to see them

People are social animals, but they’re social animals within their social groups. Rare is the person perfectly content to be airdropped into another continent where they don’t know anyone, don’t speak the language, and have no idea what any of the rules are. If you put most people in that situation, they would suddenly stop being social animals. They would suddenly become very anti-social animals, and would probably run and hide in a dumpster or something.

If you’re serious about acting, you will have inevitably built up a community around yourself, a community of other actors, mentors, talent sharks, etc.. Within this community, your skills and talents matter, because it’s this community that’s helping you develop them. Your acting coach may be telling you to try and expand your range, because your acting coach cares about you, and wants you to be a better actor.

I don’t care about you. Not yet, at least. I don’t know you. I really don’t care about your range. I care about my role, and I care about getting it filmed properly, and not getting screwed over. And I have my personal community, of industry professionals, and I have my stable of actors who I know are good, who won’t do drugs on set, don’t no-call no-show, and don’t throw temper tantrums. I’d really rather work with them. I don’t want to have to reach outside of my social group, because I don’t know what’s going on there. I can see you, but I don’t know or trust you, and I have no idea whether I can trust you with this role. If you’re an extremely skilled actor or actress with a wide range then power to you, but I don’t actually care until I see it in an audition, and to be honest the only time where having a wide range is really going to matter to me is after the production, when I’m looking to the next thing.

But when I’m scrolling through those audition tapes, really the only thing I care about is my character and whether or not you’re playing it. Not whether or not you can play it, I have too many submissions to spend time trying to guess what your range is. Any video I see of you needs to show you, playing the imaginary person that I have made up in my head, and not only playing this character, but playing them well enough that I wouldn’t be completely embarrassed to have my name after “Directed by” on that footage that you submitted. So all I’m really asking for is that you read my mind.

So how do you do that?

You don’t. Accept that in the vast majority of cases, you don’t stand a chance. But in the ones that you do stand a chance in, you’re going to make that chance even better, by cheating.

You see, I have an idea of this character, in my head. But it’s not the only idea in my head, and I didn’t make it up from scratch. This idea, like every other idea anyone has ever had, is a rip-off of someone else’s idea, and their idea was a rip-off of ideas before it, and so on. This character in my head is not unique, this role is not special, it has been played plenty of times before. It is an archetype.

So when I say “I made this character up and you need to read my mind”, what I really mean is “I’m looking for someone who can play [INSERT ARCHETYPE HERE] and I need you to be able to convincingly pass yourself off as this type. I need to cast you as this type, but I don’t have time to train you or even test to see if you can do it, so if I can see that you’ve already done it yourself, then I’ll be much more comfortable auditioning and possibly even hiring you.”

And that’s the secret. You get around the hurdle of “nobody knows who you are” by pretending to be someone that everyone already knows. You typecast yourself. You do it well enough and persistently enough, and eventually you solve problem #2 as well, just by dint of people seeing you, in that role, over and over again. It’s just like any other advertising: people don’t have to care, you just have to become prominent enough to be familiar, so that whenever they think about that particular type of character, your name comes to the tip of their tongue.

There are plenty of types/archetypes to choose from. You want to pick just one. You only need one. Not two, not three, one. One character, and you’re going to play that same character over and over again for a long time, we’re talking years. Maybe forever.

• Danny Trejo has been playing latin assassin basically his entire career. He managed to typecast himself so hard that these days he often plays as a parody of his former roles.
• Bruce Willis: literally the only movie I can think of where he’s not “action hero” is Sixth Sense.
• For women, there’s basically no movie Aubrey Plaza is in where she’s not cast as a complete lunatic.
• Helena Bonham Carter: her IMDB bio calls her “an actress of great versatility”, and she absolutely is, but the roles she’s known for aren’t versatile at all. In Fight Club she’s a crazy drug addict. In Sweeny Todd she’s a crazy widow homewrecker cannibal-accomplice . In the Harry Potter series, she’s a crazy witch that loves torture. In Les Miserables she’s a crazy, abusive guardian to Cosette.

She’s been in other roles, of course, but she absolutely has a type that she is known for and falls back to. You want crazy lady, you get Aubrey Plaza or HBC.

And of course, there’s always the story of Bob.

When to Worry About Your Range

After you’re already in the industry. Once you’re established, once everyone knows who you are, that’s when you start picking up side projects and smaller films that let you explore other roles. You keep your type forever, that’s your moneymaker and connection creator, but if you genuinely love acting and aren’t satisfied with just playing “your type”, you use smaller projects as a way to branch out. Scarlett Johansson makes her money off of Avengers, but she also genuinely likes to act, so she’ll also star in movies like Marriage Story to get a chance to do the job she actually signed up for.

If you’re talking to me about demo reels, I’m not going to be worrying about your range. I’ve got a pretty good knack for spotting a person’s ideal type as long as I can see their face and talk to them for a bit (that’s why I do the whole directing thing :), so what will happen is I’ll figure out pretty quickly what you’re good at, and then I’ll push you to start going after those roles and only those roles. Now I also have a directing range (I think I’d probably be OK at rom-coms, but anything Judd Apatow makes just burns my eyes), so if I think you might be a better fit for a role I’m not good at directing, I’ll introduce you to the guy or gal that is. That’s the big advantage of my demo skit project over the casting process, I’ll actually help you succeed instead of deleting your application.