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I guess, in a sense, 'Audition' was a film that gave me an opportunity that I hadn't had up until that point. So that's definitely one that is important to me. Then there's 'Visitor Q' that kind of taught me that there are some kinds of films that can only be made as low-budget films that really wouldn't work as anything else.
I may have gotten my first job from 'Backstage.' I remember going to the Equity offices, and I signed up for an audition. I left. I was grabbing a coffee somewhere and looking at 'Backstage' and saw that there was an audition for another project going on at the same time. It was called 'Almost Heaven: The Songs of John Denver.'
People get the wrong idea. They think because somebody's visible and works to a degree in some kind of consistent way, they just have a pile of choices. And that's not necessarily true. You can always choose not to audition and see what happens. Sometimes that's a benefit. But most things that I do, I meet on, especially films.
A few years after I graduated, I was doing a play in Boston and was asked to audition for Christophe Durang's play, 'Vonya and Sonia and Masha and Spike,' and I got the part. We were performing in Lincoln Center when, during our weekly meeting with producers, they that said they loved our show and wanted to take us to Broadway.
As a director, it became important to hear that specific role read by that specific actor, and you hear the chemistry, or you don't hear the chemistry. So I'm not so bothered by the audition process anymore; in fact, I use it. It's a time for the actor to actually get to the know the director and the producers a little bit, too.
Improv definitely made me a better auditioner, without a doubt. We did do an audition semester in grad school, and that was helpful for those times that you have a script and you have a few days to prepare it, to really work on sides. But the auditions I was doing in New York, if you got it the night before, you were very lucky.
Before 'Sunny' came along, I would audition and do chemistry reads with very funny actors. And then they would cast someone who was beautiful and benign. I don't think that very funny men wanted to headline with very funny women. They wanted to be the funny ones, and they wanted the wife to be the wife. That was very frustrating.
I had a brilliant drama teacher while I was at Roland Park: Ann Mainolfi. But the school was mostly rich in academics. It wasn't like I was prepping myself for a life in acting. There, you prepped yourself to have a stable future. The school's piece de resistance is college prep - it didn't teach you how to audition for a TV show.
When you hear you're going to audition for 'Dogfight,' the show about bringing ugly women to parties, you're like, 'Oh, great, thank you.' Then you read lines where people call you fat, and you call yourself fat or ugly, and it can wear on you. But that's also our dream as actors, to play someone else and give someone else a voice.
With film, I always sit with people first and talk a while, and then we read or sing or whatever. I never sit behind a table. I get up; I work with them. I do everything I possibly can to not audition them. I can find out the best of them from them feeling comfortable and appreciated. I'd never let someone leave feeling not valued.
I was in a band till I was about 17; then I went to television, and I spent seven years doing that. When I came to Seattle, I started to audition for things. The passion's always there, and that's what's been the hard thing: to fit that passion into a normal life. You can't do it. You can't have a normal life and pursue this dream.
And you sort of have this idea in your head about how you're going to go about the audition, and as soon as you get there, all of those thoughts just kind of drop away and you realize you're standing in front of Amy Adams, whom you've admired for years and years. That was the first time that I was ever really starstruck in my life.
I have hair that I audition with, my sitcom hair which is a curly wig. I have my long chic hair that I wear to my son's school so they know I'm not playing around. I always tell people that my husband gets a different woman every night when I come home from 'The View.' Hair makes you feel a certain way, like putting a power suit on.
One of the defense mechanisms I have for the difficulties in the business, one of which is rejection, is that if I do the work, I go in, and I'm prepared and I audition and they don't hire me, I'm always just amazed, thinking, 'Wow! For that money, they could've had Bruce McGill, and they didn't take me? I just think that's amazing.'
Getting the role in '300' saved me. I'd been out of work for 11 months after 'The Brothers Grimm.' Once the film came out and didn't do so well, the director Terry Gilliam blamed me for absolutely everything. It was pretty appalling, and I had started to wonder if I'd ever get another job again when I was asked to audition for '300.'
A friend of mine had died, and I went for an audition. It was weird and cathartic: the producer was very excited about the piece, but my brain wasn't working, and it all seemed really pointless and fickle. I told them I didn't want to be there any more, and left. It was the most terrifying and empowering audition experience I've had.
I think the most important thing is you have to learn to love auditioning, which I have definitely learned to love. It's going to be a huge part of your career, even if you're right at the top. You're still going to have to audition sometimes, and if you don't learn to love that, that's such a big part of what you're job's going to be.
There have been times when I've been asked to do things and I've thought, 'This is great! This is a great script. But, I do not believe myself in this role.' I pretend I'm the producer and I think, 'If I was making this movie, would I cast myself in this part,' and if that doesn't feel right to me, then I don't even go audition for it.
I've always been slightly self-conscious as an actor, and I guess that sometimes reads as pomposity. Starting when I was 30, I somehow gave off an impression at an audition that had them mentally put me in a three-piece suit or put an attache case in my hand. If there was a stiff-guy part, the director would brighten up when I came in.
The fact that I have done films down South didn't boost or hamper my chances here. In fact, I was still shooting for both my Telugu films when I met Ashu sir for 'Mohenjo Daro.' During the audition, he gave me five scenes with lengthy dialogues. Once I cleared them, he gave me a song to dance to. So, my Bollywood entry was no cakewalk.
I was actually going to work at Tokyo Disney. I thought, 'I'll work in the family!' That was my postgraduate plan. I didn't really have any plans lined up, but I was going to audition for this big band jazz show that was at Tokyo Disney. I think the concert was, like, for a year or something, and I thought, 'Yeah, that's what I'll do!'
I got into theatre kinda late by some standards, and I sorta fell into it. I had broken my ankle playing football, and my high school was doing a production of 'Barnum.' I could juggle, and my mom really wanted to get me out of the house. She said since I wasn't playing football and couldn't wrestle, maybe I should audition for the show.
I had an audition for Mary Jane Watson in 'Spiderman' and ended up playing Betty Brant in that series. I auditioned for Amy Adams' role in 'Catch Me If You Can' and, you know, ended up playing the bank teller. So there were a lot of times early on where I felt like I was always sort of the bridesmaid, never the bride - never quite right.
Quite honestly I never had a desire to be an actor. I tell people, I did not choose acting; acting chose me. I never grew up wanting to be an actor. I wanted to play football. In about 9th grade an English teacher told me I had a talent to act. He said I should audition for a performing arts high school so I did on a whim. I got accepted.
I couldn't make it on the swimming team in high school. In fact, I got thrown off the swimming team and was forced to audition for the school play because they had at the audition about 35 girls show up and no boys, so my swimming coach suggested that I might be able to do the drama department more good than I was doing the swimming team.
I think, going into a room for an audition, the best thing you can do is represent who you are specifically as an individual and what you can bring to a creative process in a room - as opposed to being worried about 'where you fit' - because that's really their job to decide where you fit. Your job is to just present the best 'you' you can.
At this point, I've really failed at a lot of things. It's nice to be able to say that, in a way. I've failed at music. I've failed at dance. And acting - there have been times when I went out and read lines to audition for acting parts. I believe that if anybody wrangled together those audition tapes, it would be pretty hysterically funny.
I just would never go audition, and yet I was in very visible places where people would come looking for actors. I say I'm lazy, though I'm sure if I were in therapy for a lot of years, it would turn out to be a lot more than laziness. After awhile, it was, like, too embarrassing for me not to go on auditions. I had to be humiliated into it.
The acting came about because of a girl. I was 19 and met a girl who wanted to go to the premiere drama school in Australia, the National Institute of Dramatic Arts, where Mel Gibson, Cate Blanchett and many others went. She had an audition, and I went with her for moral support - to cheer her on. I did an audition my way, and it kept going.
In the first year in New York, I went to this amazing teacher named Jen Waldman. She does lots of different classes, but one of her classes was where you went and worked on a song. And suddenly I felt like an artist again, and because I had worked the whole song, when I went into the audition room, I could connect to something in the 16 bars.
When I was 9, I auditioned for an arts school in Toronto with a few of my friends. The sole reason we auditioned was that we found out you got to miss a couple days of school to do the audition. Without actually wanting to go to arts school, I accidentally got in. My parents encouraged me to try it, and I ended falling in love with performing.
I was in school, but I wasn't into school. I wasn't doing what I wanted to be doing in school, which was film studies. That was what I intended on doing, but I didn't go away to a university because I wanted to stay in L.A. and audition while I took classes, so I elected to go to a community college and just take G.E. courses. It was terrible.
I got my big break in Bollywood with Anurag Kashyap's 'Raman Raghav 2.0' when I got a call from one of the casting directors to appear for an audition. At that point, I didn't think that I would make the cut since I was auditioning for a Bollywood film for the very first time. Within an hour of the audition, I was told that I had been selected.
I was driving in a car on my way to football practice, and I was listening to the radio, and they had one of those, like, art showcases, like, 'Do you want to be a star? Do you want to meet talent agents, managers, producers?' And I called in, and I drove 45 minutes to Salina, Kansas, to a Marriott hotel, and did a Twizzlers commercial audition.
I hadn't seen 'The Purge' until I was trying to do the research for it. But it was my friends and my cousins, in particular, who came to me not too long before the audition process and asked me if I had seen it. They were talking about how great it was. I was engaged in the opportunity to do the film because of their intrigue with the franchise.
Coming from L.A. to D.C., I'm always impressed that in D.C., people are doing the things that the people in L.A. are pretending to do. Whenever I'm in D.C., I ask people what they do, and they say, 'I'm with the agency, or I'm with State.' In L.A., I ran into a guy who said, 'I'm working on an audition for a guy who happens to be with an agency.'
I tried out for 'The Voice,' and I also tried out for 'America's Got Talent,' and both them, like, reached out to me. I had, like, little singing video on YouTube, and they were like, 'Come out for an audition.' I did, and I got a callback for both of them, actually, and, uh, didn't get anything after that. I was so heartbroken. But look at me now!