Aspiring actors listen up! This piece of advice is for you.
Do not walk into your audition holding the script. It’s an immediate, “No.” But don’t take our word for it, this advice is straight from Scrubs’ actor Zach Braff.
“Listen you actors, as someone who is more often a director these days,” said Braff on his podcast Fake Doctors, Real Friends with Zach and Donald. “If you’re trying to audition and you don’t have that stuff memorized and you’re looking down at your page, you don’t have a shot in hell.”
Being “off book,” or not needing a script for a rehearsal/audition, is something his former partner Florence Pugh swore on. Braff recalled that Pugh’s auditioning advice was always be “off book.”
“I have to give Florence a shoutout for this because she’s a better actress than I am,” he said. “She goes, ‘I just can’t be present. If there is a part of me that knows I have that crutch there and I can look down, I am not present in the scene enough to perform.”
“And that is coming from an academy award nominated actress,” said cohost Donald Faison. “So uh, I am going to be listening to that.”
Braff said that as a director, actors who come into audition without their scripts are more present. Those who come in looking down at their scripts during their audition don’t stand a chance. But sometimes, the casting decisions have nothing to do with performance, but rather with appearance.
“You could literally walk in and be the best actor for the part, but you look too much like somebody else,” Braff said. “Or you are too old, or too young, or we just cast the father and you look nothing like him. There’s so many… variables. All you can do is go in and crush and do your best.”
In the end, it all boils down to being prepared. As both actors point out, it’s impossible to control every part of an audition other than your own performance. Assume that the person who came in before you, and the one behind you memorized everything.
ORDER A COPY OF ROB’S NEW BEST SELLING BOOK! Called “America’s Number ONE Gossip Columnist” by The National Enquirer. Rob ‘Naughty But Nice’ Shuter breaks celebrity news every day on his website NaughtyGossip.com where he delivers all the dish about the stars we love in his naughty but nice signature style. You can also catch him co-hosting and breaking celebrity news on Good Day New York, The Today Show, The Talk, Wendy Williams Show, CNN, Extra and Z100’s ‘Elvis Duran.’ Previously, Rob was the Huffington Post’s only celebrity columnist and the former executive editor of OK! Magazine. Rob has also hosted his own Saturday night talk show on Mark Cuban’s channel and his own daily morning show, ‘The Gossip Table,’ on VH1! Breaking some of the biggest entertainment stories, including Jamie Lynn Spears’s pregnancy news, Britney’s first post-meltdown interview, Eva Longoria’s wedding, and baby exclusives for Jessica Alba, Tori Spelling and Mathew McConaughey’s tots, Rob always knows where to find the best scoop. Before Rob was one of the world’s most successful entertainment reporters, he was a publicist working for Jennifer Lopez, Alicia Keys, P. Diddy, Jessica Simpson and Jon Bon Jovi! Now he is bringing all this experience to his new show on I HEART MEDIA in his unique cheeky way, that is always a pinch and never a punch!