At a SAG Foundation Casting Access Project workshop last week, I started a sentence and then stopped, realizing it was effin’ brilliant. I said, “Y’all, tweet this. It’s gold.” And then I said it: “Never sacrifice your acting for the exacting.”

What the heck is exacting? Right? Right.

Well, let me set the stage for you. We were about to start a cold read scene and I asked if the actors had any questions. One asked how to pronounce a name she would have to say, in the scene. I answered her question, but then decided to share a tip, because I’ve seen “learning the right way to say something” trip up aaalllll the actor prep an actor may have done, several times.

If you’ve prepped the scene for a day or more before your audition and you haven’t known for sure how to pronounce a particular word, that means you’ve likely been running the lines with incorrect pronunciation. You’ve wired into your performance this “wrong” way to say the word. Then you’re at the audition, you’re asked if you have any questions, you ask how to pronounce the word because you want to get it right, and it’s NOT how you’ve been practicing it. Uh-oh. That info could derail your performance.

Perfect example: When casting the festival darling Queen of Cactus Cove, actors came in and asked how to pronounce Achak. That was one of the character’s names, and it was pronounced A-chack. Many people tried to turn it into a-CHOCK. If asked, I would say, “It’s A-chack, like 8-track” (which of course, was hilarious to me, since I was dealing with actors far too young to remember an 8-track tape as well as I do). And as soon as I said “A-chack,” if the actor had been thinking “a-CHOCK,” I could see mental wheels start turning.

The audition would begin and I could see the actor, reciting in her head, “A-chack, A-chack, A-chack,” rather than listening to the actor with whom she was paired. There was no connection. There was no “yes, and…” going on. There was only a chant of, “A-chack, A-chack, A-chack,” racing through her mind, because she wanted to be so sure to get it right. And this happened several times over the audition sessions for this project. Actors sacrificed their acting, because they really wanted to be sure they got the words exactly right.

So, if the choice is, “Get the word right,” or, “show us your take on the role,” the latter is what we want. We want to see the acting, not the “exacting.”

Now, this is not permission to blow off the script, to rewrite the words that were meticulously put together over a very long period of time to get to the sides that you hold in your hand. Not by a longshot. Especially with TV auditions, the script is king and you are there to serve it. But trust that we can fix the pronunciation later. Don’t sacrifice the ONLY thing we cannot do without you: the acting!

Bonnie Gillespie is living her dreams by helping others figure out how to live theirs. Wanna work with Bon? Start here. Thanks!

Originally published by Actors Access at http://more.showfax.com/columns/avoice/archives/001307.html. Please support the many wonderful resources provided by the Breakdown Services family. This posting is the author’s personal archive.