Call Backs

Tuesday 3rd May

Call Backs 

Today we had our call back from Thursday’s auditions. After our auditions we had received some feedback from Kelly to help with our preparations for our call-backs. Kelly had mentioned to me how well I had done at portraying the older version of ‘Mickey’ and that she thought I had brought a lot of emotion to the monologue. She also mentioned that when it came to my performance for a seven-year-old version of ‘Mickey’ that I could act more like a seven-year-old and that I just needed to let go and go for it. In order to acquire the role, I would really have to show Kelly the role of a child come to life. I took all of the notes ‘Kelly’ gave me into account and worked on them all of them over the weekend. In order to do this, I looked up some performances of ‘Mickey’ as a seven-year-old and this helped me to make my own ideas on how I wanted to perform this piece. I actually think this helped me to realise the two new pieces of script we had been given and what I could do to bring the character to life more. For example, what I thought of as one of my best ideas was that in the younger version of the script when Mickey was running off from Linda he could get on his imaginary horse. I felt this would definitely highlight my more childlike self.

I found I was very stressed the night before the audition. I truly wanted this role and felt that I had a good chance of getting the role as long as I didn’t mess this call back up. Which, in past auditions I have done before and I feel my tendency to freeze in auditions has held me back from fulfilling my full potential. I was finding it difficult to sleep that night, with all of these ideas coming into my head.

On the day of the call backs, I was feeling confident and just wanted to make sure I was fully prepared. In the morning I went straight into preparation and gathered everyone I needed to rehearse the scenes we were performing. I was running through everything with Geoffrey, Charley, Mark, Latoya and Ethan. So, I had many people to run this through with. I didn’t change my performance majorly each time I did it, just so I didn’t throw myself off and I wanted to be the best I could. I utilised the ideas I had thought of over the weekend and those that I worked with seemed to like them and agreed that they worked in the scene. I knew this because once I had done some of them, the others auditioning started to copy those ideas. I didn’t mind this and instead took it as a compliment. I was fully confident in my performance and was sure in what I wanted to portray. I felt that the call back went very well, I didn’t miss a line and hit every idea and mannerisms that I wanted to. My partner and I bounced off each other really well and that every scene was as good as it could be. In that moment we truly gave it our all and I think all my hard work really paid off.

After everyone had finished their auditions, we all took a break while Kelly talked to Kane about their observations. Upon finishing my own audition the people in my class started to come up to me and commenting on how well I had done and how I had surprised them and that they thought I would get the role. This made me extremely happy and proud of myself for all of the work that I had put in to create the character and understand ‘Mickey’ and all the research I had done. I had learnt how necessary all of this was from my past auditions and that I had noticed the need to improve on my preparation in future auditions. This experience had paid off as I had never had so much positive feedback from my previous auditions. I never wanted people to think I was a bad actor, I felt this might have been the case earlier in the year with my tendency to do badly in auditions. To know how well people thought of my audition was a great feeling and made my day.