Mistakes are your Gold

We want to send the best tape off we can, but this can morph into wanting to send the perfect tape. Pursuit of perfection can make your performance wooden and controlled. If you’re someone who at the sniff of something going wrong goes to press stop, Stop Doing That and instead, if you ‘stuff up’, KEEP GOING!

The beautiful aspect of making a mistake, whether that’s forgetting a line, getting tongue tied, or breaking a prop, is the viewer gets to see a human deal with a problem in real time. You can’t get any more authentic than that. I’m not saying go out and purposefully try to stuff something up - that’s not a mistake, that’s planning & strategy which is an actor’s worst foe when trying to give an authentic, alive performance.

It’s not the end of the world if you stuff up! And if you can maintain your focus within the scene and keep going, it just may be your best take yet.

I can already hear you saying, "But Julia, what about if I have a costume malfunction?!", or "My kid walked into the scene to tell me they need the toilet". Absolutely that may ruin a take so tattoo this onto your ring light:

If the mistake is yours - keep going. If it's outside of your control - stop the tape.

For example, you forget your lines - keep going. Improvise your way through to the end of the scene. If the garbage truck stops right outside your window while you're shooting and you can’t hear a word you’re saying - stop the tape. Embrace mistakes that make your performance more compelling versus the ones that take you completely out of the scene.

Will you send the tape with the mistake in it to casting? Maybe! Maybe not. But what's more important is teaching your body to keep going when everything is falling apart, (it's probably not by the way, it may just feel like that). We can be so quick to judge and criticise ourselves when we think it's not 'right', but you might be surprised when you watch the tape back.