Talent agents & managers are crucial for your success as an actor. Knowing what to send them will increase the chance of getting signed. Here’s what to know.
How to Submit Yourself to a Talent Agency
Hey actors, it’s Wendy Alane Wright, the Hollywood Talent Manager in Los Angeles, California. We’re going to talk about What should I send to agents or managers if I’m looking for representation?
The answer to that question is, you need to send your package. It can be called an actor’s toolkit. It’s a combination of your headshots, your acting clips, or demo reel, and your resume.
What Do We Look For In Resumes?
We’re looking for a professional format. If you don’t know how to professionally format your resume, we know you’re new, because experienced actors know how to do that. So we’re looking for a professionally formatted resume. We’re looking for acting clips, or demo reels, something that shows us that you can act well.
You want to make sure that you’ve been training, but you’re going to put together one clip that can get you a good agent or manager. It could be you doing a scene, you’re on camera, and you’re talking to the reader off-camera. And the other persons in this are not on camera, but we hear them. That’s like a self-tape.
It also could be a scene, where you have someone else on camera that you’ve shot or went to a studio to shoot to produce for you. But something that shows like it’s from a student film, maybe it’s from a short film or web series, but something that shows us that you can act. It needs to start on you, not on the other actor. It needs to start with you speaking.
It also needs to not start on you doing the behavior, like walking into the room. Don’t do that. We don’t need to see you hang up your coat, get a… pour a glass of orange juice. No. Just right here, like this, start on you speaking. That’s what’s the most powerful.
Headshots
Your headshots are really important and so is learning how to take headshots, so that you get a headshot where you’re feeling something, where you have expressed thoughts, and you’re thinking thoughts in your eyes, and in your mind when you’re taking those pictures. That’s important because we want headshots that have the life of you in them. We can see your personality, your energy, your emotion, your attitude in the shot, posing. It’s not modeling. This is acting. So it’s not about posing. It’s about feeling emotions and thinking real thoughts in front of the headshot photographer.
What you send to agents and managers are your headshots, your acting clips or demo reel, and a properly formatted resume. You add that all to an email, and then you want to put a link to your Actors Access profile if you’re in the United States. If you’re in Europe, you’re using Spotlight. If you are in Australia, you’re using StarNow and Casting Networks. If you’re in Canada, you’re using Casting Workbook.
So you have these different places in the different parts of the world, but basically, that’s where everything is housed. We can see your headshot, your resume, and your clip also on your profile, and you send that link to Actors Access.
Customized Links
That means when you sign in to Actors Access, you go to the Tools, scroll down to the Custom link, click on that, and then delete the numbers in the box and add your name. Add your name, and save it. That’s your customized link. And that’s the link that you want to put in your Actors Access. OK? That’s the link to your Actors Access you want to put in your emails.
I get it eventually. And then that’s what you send off. And when we get your email, make sure that you set your resume as a PDF, not as a DOC, because everybody’s computer opens things differently.
If you are in LA, you might want to put your LA Casting link as well. If you’re in the United States put your Casting Networks link as well. Every actor in LA and United States needs LA Casting if you’re in LA. Casting Networks if you’re anywhere else in the world and anywhere else in the country, and Actors Access.
So put Actors Access and your Casting Networks links in the email. Because as agents and managers, we take what you’ve put on Actors Access, and we send that to casting. So you’re learning how to create an amazing package on Actors Access, it’s your job as an actor. And, as a mentor, I teach actors how to do that in a really powerful way. You know, I know exactly what to put on those to make you stand out. I know what does not need to go on those.
Because as a manager, when somebody comes to me, and they come to me with their Actors Access, I’m going to clean that thing completely up. I’m going to delete everything that doesn’t need to be on there. I’m going to reformat it. I’m going to move things around. I’m going to make it more powerful and just put things on there that help you stand out. I’m going to know how to do that, and so that’s what I’m going to do when I work with actors.
Also, if I look at your acting clips, I’m going to see what’s not working. So if I sign a new actor, we’re cleaning up the clips. If they don’t work, we’re throwing them out completely, and we’re getting new ones. That’s why I highly recommend that you take the Hollywood Winner’s Circle Master Course because you will learn more in that course than you will learn in five years trying to figure it out on your own.
And I love working with new actors and teaching them how to get started in the business and putting together a really powerful package that stands out and makes people pay attention to you. You’ve got to learn how to make them pay attention to you, or you’ll get lost in a sea of thousands and thousands of people that want to be actors, but they have no idea what they’re doing. And agents and managers get so many submissions that they just delete. But we don’t want anyone deleting you, because I want you to be successful.
