I don’t like auditioning.

 

There. I said it.

 

All the preparation, all the training, all the hours, all the crazy thoughts – all for three minutes in a room where the variables responsible for deciding whether or not you get a role are infinite, and the least of which is probably the quality of your acting. Despite the fact that the audition room is nothing like what the actual set will be like, you are expected to act, behave, and take direction as if you had booked the role already. Okay, I definitely get that, I do. Casting directors need to know that you are a dependable actor who will be able to deliver during crunch time. And still, the whole thing ends up feeling far too much like a dance monkey dance scenario when all is said and done.

 

Auditions often go like this: You rearrange your schedule for the day and convince yourself that no appointment, meeting, event, or meal is as important as this audition. You break down the breakdown and probably question why they’re calling you in for this role in the first place, pour over the lines (in some cases…that would be singular), research the project and spend an inordinate amount of time perusing the addictive labyrinth that is IMDb, spend too many unproductive minutes dreaming about landing the job, hurry to the audition, get lost, grow frazzled, urge yourself not be frazzled (which only makes it worse), find the right building and kick yourself for not having found it sooner, review and review more than you should in your head, and now find yourself sitting in a chair (or on a couch or just the floor or leaning against a wall) trying too hard not to look awkward. But you probably do anyway. Then they call you in, after what seems like either too little time or too much time (the grass is always greener…), and you go in probably only to end up doing precisely what you told yourself not to do. Finally, you leave, in an anti-climactic flurry, convinced (or at least telling yourself) that you’re probably not cut out for the acting world anyway.

 

And then you wait. And wait some more. And keep waiting.

 

The waiting is the worst. It’s the only thing I can think of that I like less than auditions. At least with an audition you have a chance. Waiting is slow and painful torture that may or may not turn into anything at all, like a sneeze that never comes. Everyone will tell you that you have to forget the audition as soon as you walk out the door, but that’s about as easy as something incredibly difficult, especially if you really wanted the part, which is the other thing you’re not supposed to do (another maddening concept to wrap your head around). The easiest way to do it, of course, is just to occupy yourself with more auditions and jobs, acting or otherwise, but then out the window goes all that “maybe not cut out for acting” pep talk you thought you were giving yourself.

 

But auditions, like so many things, are as necessary as they are terrible. If nothing else, take comfort in knowing that the shittiest of auditions will make for the most memorable stories when you make it big, like Chris Evans from Captain America demonstrated recently in an interview with Backstage.

I look forward to the day when I, too, will have an awkward Ben Affleck story to tell. That’s when I’ll know that auditions are the least of my problems.