Audition Postmortem

I had my aforementioned audition for a student film at House Productions yesterday, and I felt pretty good about it. It was a tricky character, because he'd been in a car accident five years ago and just got out of a clinic for young victims of brain trauma. So there were things in the breakdown like "a little off" or "mildly impaired." Since his dialogue was pretty straightforward and there weren''t a lot of references to his impairment in the script, and he was pretty bright before the accident, I was wary of overdoing it but still needed to show some sort of problem. Also, in the words of Robert Downey Jr. in Tropic Thunder, I didn't want to go "full retard." So I'd been working on a childishness and innocence. There weren't many layers of subtext to his lines, so any irony or subtle humor would have been out of place. Luckily my thoughts coincided with the director, because that was basically her note before the audition.

While working on it at home beforehand, I realized I'd been focusing a lot on the character stuff but not at all on what I felt about what was happening in the scene, or what I thought about what I was saying, which is unfortunately a habit of mine I'm trying to get out of. At least I realized it before I got to the office. So I incorporated that with the character work and did my best to really listen to my partner, and that's about all you can do.

They had a few other casting sessions going on, and one was for some little kids for a commercial. I've been to a few casting offices while that was happening, and good god is it depressing. I looked over and saw a stage mom taking a picture of her five-year old son with a sideways ballcap, short sleeve-over-long sleeve tshirts, and sunglasses making two peace signs. He looked like the kind of character a struggling sitcom adds in its sixth season that completely alienates the rest of its diminishing audience. Does that qualify as child abuse?