Self Tape or Self....

It is the first week of January. The agent’s office has been open for roughly the length of a kettle boil and already — ding — the first self-tape of the year arrives. Covid may be history, but self-tapes are clearly immortal, like cockroaches and Keith Richards. Actors are divided. Some loathe them. Some tolerate them. Most of us quietly question when “turn your flat into a television studio” became part of the job description. Ring light, neutral wall, no sign of personal happiness in frame. Personally, I don’t mind them. Casting gets to see actual acting, not just a headshot where I look either startled or mildly guilty. And sometimes — brace yourself — a job follows. I’ve had two old-fashioned, in-the-room meetings this year. Both became jobs. I’ve had rather more self-tapes that became… character-building. This latest one was for a show I genuinely love, heading into season two. Good character description. Promising notes. Then the script arrived: four pages, four characters, all in a car. My contribution? Two lines. One of them a single word. But they wanted the entire scene on the tape. Meaning someone in my living room would need to perform three other parts for five minutes while I practised advanced facial listening and waited to say “Right” and then, eventually, something vaguely meaningful at the end. Now look, I know not every role comes with a speech that wins awards. But even “Second Man at Bus Stop” usually gets three sentences and a mild emotional journey. If self-tapes are meant to show what we can do, we do rather need something to do. So I declined. Politely. If you’d like to see me with other actors in a room, lovely. If you’d like to judge my ability to deliver four words based on the last few decades of television work, also lovely. But asking someone to mime driving while waiting for two syllables feels less like casting and more like an endurance sport. Self-tapes are here to stay. Fine. Useful, even. But deadlines need to be humane and material needs to be playable. Otherwise it all starts to feel less like professional auditioning and more like self-tape and self-abuse. Which, I suspect, was not in the original casting breakdown.