02/11/2020
Blogging for the Brand with the Blue Collar Acting Coach!
Acting for the Brand
When I first started the journey of being a professional actor, I knew very little. I had a passion and I had a goal and that was about it. In retrospect, I kind of felt like a member of the Wu Tang Clan just coming of age and setting forth on a mystical journey to find the Magical Monastery lost in the mists of the mountains of Tibet. (Very dramatic, right?) Over the course of that journey, I learned that the journey wasn’t mystical at all and that the goal was certainly not unattainable. The profession of acting is just that: a profession. It can be realized with hard work and knowledge, just like any other profession. In the years since I left my clan, I have realized that if you treat your acting career as a business, and use proven business practices, you can be successful in this career. As an actor, you have to learn to market yourself, and part of marketing yourself is understanding how to brand yourself to get the most bang for your buck as you work toward your goal of being a working actor!
When most of you think of branding, you may think of McDonald’s Golden Arches or Geico’s Lizard. These icons are not unrelated to the way an actor needs to brand themselves. What McDonalds and Geico have done is, by using these now iconic images, they have created a type of short hand so that when you think of a fast food chain or an insurance provider, the Golden Arches or the Lizard come to mind and this causes their business to jump to the top of the list over say, Blimpy Burgers or Allied Insurance. An actor must do the same. An actor must find a type of short hand to tell an agent, casting director, producer, director who they are and what they play in a very short amount of time so that they might move to the forefront of Casting’s mind when selecting actors for a specific role. This is the brand! Casting only spends a few seconds looking over your headshot to see if you have the right look for the gig. Branding allows you to communicate everything you need to communicate as quickly as possible so that the casting director recognizes your type immediately. The stronger and more pronounced the brand, the more likely it is that you will be brought in for an audition.
I play a lot of bad guys. I have long hair and a goatee. My headshot has a very serious look. There is no mistake that when looking at my headshot, I mean business. I take my brand even further. The wardrobe I wear to an audition plays into my brand. Dark tees and jeans. Maybe camouflage cargoes. Dusty cowboy boots and Doc Martens. I go even further. The music on my reel is hard rocking guitar music like Livewire from Motley Crue or Panama from Van Halen. And still, I go further. My website has dark and grainy production photos from set and the font is red and light grey against a black backdrop. None of this is by accident. It is all created by design to sell a specific image. That image is of the bad-guy, anti-hero character actor. That is my brand!!
Some people have shown me headshots of themselves in period wardrobe or in police uniforms or medical smocks and asked if this is their brand. These are character shots. A character shot is a specific look that fits WITHIN your brand, but it’s not your brand. Unlike a character shot, the brand is all encompassing. The brand defines a look and an attitude that makes it easy for a casting director to place you when selecting actors to bring in for auditions. The brand sets the table for all your associated marketing and even helps you more clearly submit to specific projects and casting directors that work on the types of shows where your brand is pervasive. For instance, I’ll target shows like Game of Thrones and WestWorld before I target Days of Our Lives and Riverdale. That’s not to say these shows won’t occasionally have roles in your type, but you will have more opportunity with the types of shows in your brand. And, once you become established , you won’t have to submit for the odd role that comes along in non-branded shows. The casting directors will call you in because you have begun to earn a reputation as the person to call for your particular brand of character.
Now, some people are adverse to falling into a ‘type’. This argument represents the fact that many actors believe that they can play any type of character. They are actors, after all. This is true! I believe that good actors can play against type and find a way to relate to and personalize any role successfully. However, having a brand and playing a type isn’t meant to diminish your abilities as an actor. It’s supposed to speed up the process of finding solid ground from which to win roles and build your career. If acting is a percentages game, the more auditions you have directly effect the number of gigs you book. Say you are a super star and book 4 out of every 10 auditions. If you get 10 auditions all year, you’ll get 4 gigs...if You get 40 auditions in a year...well...you can do the math. Playing against type offers you fewer opportunities. Playing into your brand, however, will give you more opportunities. Playing a type and developing a brand isn’t a slight against your ability as an actor to play a variety of types and roles. Instead, it’s a marketing tool to help you create income, credits, and establishment within the industry. Once you have these things, it’s a lot easier for your agent/ manager to leverage your successes into the opportunity to play against your type. And when an actor plays against an established type successfully, they are usually hailed for their ability to do so.
Now, go out and find your brand and live it throughout your acting life!
*** If you are in the New Orleans Region, please join Christian every Monday Night for his ongoing Actor’s Lab from 7pm-10pm. The Actor’s Lab is uniquely tailored to each individual actor’s specific needs. Seating is limited, so if interested, please send a message to the Blue Collar Studio FB Page with an email address and we’ll send you the details!
***The Blue Collar Acting Studios offers mobile coaching and traveling workshops throughout the United States. Please visit the Blue Collar Acting Coach FB Page for rates and upcoming workshops in an area near you.
