Tag Archives: actress

Interview With casting director, coach, actress & founder of Sound Advice Kate McClanaghan

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Interview With casting director, coach, actress & founder of Sound Advice Kate McClanahan voice over work1. Tell us a bit about yourself. 

I’m a seasoned casting director, producer, coach, actress and founder of SOUND ADVICE, a unique, one-stop option for unparalleled voice over coaching, and exceptional demo production for all skill and experience levels.

I had been a freelance producer since I was 19 years old, producing commercials for Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Dodge, JC Penney, FORD, Sprint, SEARS, and Kraft, to name a few. I had always been freelance because I’m a union actress as well. I’ve studied with the Royal Shakespeare in London, and came up through Chicago’s Second City and ImprovOlympic (IO), and even brought 9 shows to the Edinburgh Fringe.

2. What made you start Big House Casting & Audio and Actors’ Sound Advice?

BIG HOUSE came about to service the various casting and production demands that consistently kept coming in the door after I had produced a number of freelance projects for NPR. I was already freelance, I just named it after the enormous, greystone building we worked and lived in, in Chicago.

I started SOUND ADVICE because I couldn’t find a single, reliable source that would take me through the entire process of voiceover training, demo production, branding and marketing the career I was after. There were random people who did pieces, but didn’t have the whole in mind. I wanted a single source that honestly had my best interests in mind, understood my greatest commercial assets (perhaps even better than I did), and could produce my demos well enough to truly advance my career, not just my voiceover!

I began assisting friends, and after coaching and producing more than 100 demos for them and seeing them achieve remarkable results rather quickly, I realized my casting and production skills had a greater purpose!

3. How important is training?

It’s imperative. Without it, regardless of how naturally talented, smart, and mellifluous the voice might be… you’re dealing with a loose cannon. You can’t rely on a talent who doesn’t know their job. Trusting a million-dollar campaign to a complete hack puts everyone’s reputation on the line. And your mettle will be tested. There are no beginner, intermediate and advanced talent in this industry. You’re either a professional… or you’re not. Training defines your professionalism and instills confidence. And commerce is confidence.

4. Any tips for acing an audition?

Instead of trying to second-guess what those auditioning you are thinking, give them something interesting to think about. That’s the job! Besides they honestly aren’t thinking a thing. It’s precisely why you’re there. How would YOU play it?

THINK for yourself! In fact, entertain yourself and you’ll find your audience!

5. How different is voice over acting from acting?

There is very little, if any difference at all. Acting is acting is acting.

Voice acting is closest to film acting than any other medium, because they both demand a very vivid imagination and the desire to tell a story, often in the most constricting conditions. Personality and the ability to self direct are key attributes as well.

Perhaps the greatest difference is the fact that in nearly all voiceover scenarios, you’re all by your lonesome in the booth with no one to play off but yourself.

6. Tell us about your books.

The SOUND ADVICE Encyclopedia of Voice-over & The Business of Being a Working Talent is currently in its third edition. (There will be a fourth sometime next year.) It’s more than 500 printed pages of well-vetted industry insider information as well as How To Get An Agent, the branding, marketing and promotion of your career, to more than 100 printed pages of terms and phrases commonly used in all manner of acting for recorded media.

7. How do you become a successful voice over actor?

Do your homework. Practice. If you were to honestly dedicate 25 to 30 hours a week, what would be considered part-time for any other business, for a year or more to creating a voiceover career for yourself, then the chances of becoming successful in this field is more likely—provided, of course, you have realistic expectations and you wisely allocate your time.

You need a proper Vocal Warm Up, and maintain it 4 to 5 times a week for a solid half hour to 45 minutes at a time. Granted it may take you a couple weeks to incorporate it into your weekly routine, but without it your vocal precision and stamina won’t be as reliable as it should be.

Check out our website www.voiceoverinfo.com. Study up. Listen to a lot of demos.

Listen to our podcasts then email us. We have talent all over the world. Provided you have a reliable computer and stable Internet service, we can generally work with just about anyone from anywhere—we just don’t invite everyone to do a demo. (Our name is on it too. We don’t produce a demo track in an hour. Nearly every other demo production house does.)

Everything we do as SOUND ADVICE, just like in nearly everything in voiceover, is one-on-one. We don’t cookie-cutter anything. And we offer the best insight because we continually survey the industry as to what’s needed and wanted from talent in every aspect of the industry.

 

 

Jamie-Lynn Sigler: ‘I have Multiple Sclerosis’

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Jamie-Lynn Sigler- 'I have Multiple Sclerosis'Sopranos actress reveals 15-year battle with the disease.

Sopranos actress Jamie-Lynn Sigler has revealed she has been secretly suffering from multiple sclerosis (MS) for almost 15 years.

The newly married actress married baseball player Cutter Dykstra in California over the weekend. She was diagnosed with the disease when she was only 20 years old. A year before that she had been diagnosed with Lyme disease.

She told People magazine “I wasn’t ready until now… You’d think that after all these years, somebody would be settled with something like this, but it’s still hard to accept.”

She had decided to go public about her illness because of her new husband and their two-year-old son Beau. She said, “I think I’m at a point in my life with my son, with my new marriage, it’s a new me and I want to live my truth. I don’t want to hold a secret where it feels like I have something to be ashamed of or have something to hide… It’s part of who I am, but it’s not who I am… I didn’t want him (Beau) to get to an age where he felt like he had to keep this secret for me as well… I wanted to be an example to him of strength and courage.”

She went on, “It was a shock, it was surprising… to get the diagnosis was confusing but also strange because I didn’t feel sick. I didn’t feel like anything was really wrong. At the time my ideas of MS were limited… I thought it meant wheelchair, I thought it meant your life was over. And so there began my almost 15 years of being in denial… I didn’t want to believe that was going to be my future.”

She admitted that her symptoms had been bad over the past ten years but she hide it from film and TV bosses, saying:

“Sometimes all I needed was like five or 10 minutes to sit and recharge but I wouldn’t ask, because I didn’t want them to be suspicious,” she says. “I can’t walk for a long period of time without resting. I cannot run. No superhero roles for me… Stairs? I can do them but they’re not the easiest. When I walk, I have to think about every single step, which is annoying and frustrating.”

The 34-year-old actress takes medication for the incurable condition. She says this has kept her symptoms stable for past six years.  She said: “Things are manageable now… It takes a fighting attitude to deal with all this. This disease can absolutely take over your life if you let it.”

 

 

Rose McGowan Fired By Agent For Calling Out Hollywood Sexism

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rosemcgowanfiredbyagentRose McGowan has been fired by her agent for pointing out how sexist a casting was. The casting was for an Adam Sandler movie she auditioned for. The script notes stated “push-up bras encouraged,” and the name of the male lead rhymed with “Madam Panhandler.” The Charmed star tweeted:

She went on to say “It was just so dumb. I was offended by the stupidity more than anything… This is normal to so many people.” She then said she was “not trying to vilify Adam Sandler,”

Unbelievably, the tweet made her agent fire her. She went back on Twitter to say: “I just got fired by my wussy acting agent because I spoke up about the bulls— in Hollywood. Hahaha. Douchebags… Bring it… The awesome thing about being an artist? You can’t be fired from your own mind. Freedom.”

Depressing. It seems that Hollywood still has a way to go when it comes to equality.

 

Interested in acting? Read Catherine Balavage’s book on acting, How To Be a Successful Actor: Becoming an Actorpreneur. It has gotten numerous five star reviews and has been called the ‘best advice available’ by numerous sources.

 

 

Fashematics: Oscars Fashion Infographic

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With the Oscars fast approaching we are getting excited about…the clothes. Okay, it is about the films but the red carpet is a place for the actors and fashion designers to shine. We love this impressive infographic from Lyst. Over half the team at Lyst are data scientists, crunching over 100,000 data changes every hour from 9,000 fashion partners.

This week we tasked them with looking at the outfits worn by the Best Actress winners at the Oscars over the last 80 years.

They came up with a mathematically true formula that calculates the probability that a look will be Oscar winning, and also the luckiest combination.

The attached infographic sums up their findings, plus some extra data around the awards.

J is the luckiest letter for a Best Actresses’ first name to start with (good news for Julianne Moore this year)

oscarsfashion

Made by  www.lyst.com

 

 

Amanda Seyfried: Being ‘Overweight’ Has Affected My Acting Career

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Want to know how hard it is to be an actress? Then just look at how slim Amanda Seyfried is and then read her tweet below.

The Mean Girls actress went on to say in an interview with Elle UK.: “I don’t have to look like a supermodel. I don’t have to have those abs, the camera doesn’t see that. But because we have all been designed to want these things, I’m a victim of this stuff, too. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t constantly aware of what I’m doing with my body.”

Amanda_Seyfried_2009

It is very disappointing that Hollywood, and the media in general, cannot get over their cookie cutter one-size-fits-all view of beauty. Amanda Seyfried is not ‘overweight’. I understand that you have to be in shape and healthy to act and the camera really does add 10 pounds, but the world would be a truly horrible world if we all looked the same. Hollywood: take note.

If you are an actor then check out my book How To Be a Successful Actor: Becoming an Actorpreneur. It is available in print and in all eBook formats on both Smashwords and Amazon. It has had 5 five star reviews. 

Russell Crowe: Female Actors Should Act Their Age. Meryl Streep Responds

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There has been some uproar after Russell Crowe said that female actors should act their age. Meryl Streep came out in support of him and The Guardian did a great quiz on actors and playing age.

Russell said in an interview with the Australian Women’s Weekly: “To be honest, I think you’ll find that the woman who is saying that [the roles have dried up] is the woman who at 40, 45, 48, still wants to play the ingenue, and can’t understand why she’s not being cast as the 21-year-old, Meryl Streep will give you 10,000 examples and arguments as to why that’s bullshit, so will Helen Mirren, or whoever it happens to be. If you are willing to live in your own skin, you can work as an actor. If you are trying to pretend that you’re still the young buck when you’re my age, it just doesn’t work. I have heard of an actress, part of her fee negotiation was getting the number of children she was supposed to have lessened. Can you believe this? This (character) was a woman with four children, and there were reasons why she had to have four children – mainly, she lived in a cold climate and there was nothing to do but fornicate all day – so quit arguing, just play the role!”

Russell_Crowe female actors should act their age

Unfortunately that is not right at all. While some women will not want to play older, I have met a few, the roles for women are usually terrible when under 40: girlfriend, stripper, ‘the girl‘, a whore or merely window-dressing. When a women is over 40 the roles do not realistically reflect women’s lives. We are usually the mother, grandmother, crone or witch.

Jezebel blogger Rebecca Rose had this to say: “ALERT: Hollywood movie actor person Russell Crowe is fed up with all the old ladies who dare to want to be cast as something other than old spinsters or whatnot. Quit complaining that you’re cast in a role where your character has ‘nothing to do but fornicate all day’ and make a bunch of babies. Stop demanding that film-makers try to expand the depth of your character beyond ‘broodmare’. Just play the role, OK? Funny how Crowe doesn’t bother to offer any opinion about the mind-boggling legacy of Hollywood men playing romantic leads to women 10, 20, 30, and sometimes 40 (!!!!!) years younger than them,” Rose added. “Because it’s clearly the sad old women daring to pretend they are outside their actual birth ages that are ruining Hollywood … Thanks Crowe for reminding us, yet again, that women are always held in contempt for doing anything remotely similar to what their male counterparts do without reproach.” Very good points. Men do not tend to ‘play their age’ and their on-screen wives are usually significantly younger than them.

 

Amy Gray wrote on Junkee.com,  “The ‘ingenue’ roles Crowe refers to are the only ones readily available for women; on the flip side, the majority of male characters in film and TV are aged between their 30s (27%) and 40s (31%). That could be because we’re more likely to want to watch lead characters based on their fuckability – and the older a woman gets, as any executive will tell you, the less faceable she becomes.” Crowe is 50 and also said “The point is, you do have to be prepared to accept that there are stages in life. So I can’t be the Gladiator forever,”

 

What do you think?

If you are an actor then check out my book How To Be a Successful Actor: Becoming an Actorpreneur. It is available in print and in all eBook formats on both Smashwords and Amazon. It has had 5 five star reviews. 

 

 

Sarah Parish on Acting: It Can Turn You Into a Monster

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Sarah Parish has given a rather excellent interview to the Radio Times. Here are some of my favourite quotes from it.

On starting acting: “I had no confidence. I think because I started so low. I had quite low expectations. I felt one step behind, and it’s always been, ‘I can’t believe they actually chose me’. I went for small parts because I thought that was probably the only thing I would get. I never auditioned for leads. I just assumed I wouldn’t get them.” That is said with so much self-parody that I feel like I’m allowed to ask: “Do you think you missed out because of that?” Huge eyebrows: “Well… ya think? But you live the life you’ve lived, don’t you? I didn’t have that God-given confidence you get from going to a public school and going to Rada. I went to a comprehensive and felt lucky if I got a job in the chorus. But the upside is I was never disappointed.”

hatfieldandmccoy

If the industry has gotten better for women in the past 20 years: “I did hear something alarming the other day, I bumped into a friend at an audition, another girl my age. I asked if she was still doing this show – I can’t tell you what it is – and she said, ‘No, it was cancelled. The reason they gave was that they already had a female-driven programme.’ Wow. Because you can’t have two female-led dramas on telly. How awful would that be! So we’re still not there. I don’t know if we’ll ever be equal. We’ve still got an old-fashioned way of receiving female characters. They’ve got to be the wife, or they’ve got to be nuts.”

On the charity she and her husband, James Murray, set up; the Murray Parish Trust: “It’s in memory of Ella-Jayne, our first daughter.” [She died of congenital heart failure at eight months old] “It’s a terrifying and traumatic time [when your child is ill], you just want to be there all the time. They really, really need this hospital. The accommodation they’ve got for parents at the moment is so sad. £70 million it’s going to cost. Our charity is the little Jack Russell that goes down the hole and scoops everybody out. The big money willcome in afterwards.”

Second daughter Nell gets in the way of her career: “My agent will say, Darling, you’ve got to do a play’. I don’t want to do a play. Why do I have to do a play? You have to go off and do your time in a play to remind a certain genre of people that you’re still an actor. It’s a ball ache. I don’t want to have to leave my daughter and go to London every night.”

On pilot season: “If there was a little room you could go in beforehand where you checked in your dignity, your soul and your pride, that would be fine. But unfortunately you have to go into pilot season as a whole person. Every day you drive around with your clothes in the back of the car, you sit in rooms full of people as sad and as desperate as you are, with so much make-up on they could sink the Titanic, tiny little thin people. Sometimes casting directors might look at you, sometimes they might be on the phone, sometimes they’ll talk over you. And more often than not, you’ll hear nothing. I have got jobs out of it before, but it’s just not worth it. We tape all our [audition] stuff in our garden shed, now. Having a shed in our back garden has made us a lot of money, me and Jim.”

On the pressure on men: “You have to have a six pack, you have to have a pair of glutes, you have to wax your chest. You have to sign a contract saying you will show your bum. You see these poor guys right before a scene, doing press-ups, when they should be thinking about their character. That’s what we’ve come to expect from men on screen now. It’ll be from up there [she gestures to some nameless authority]. Hot, young people with perfect bodies. That’s what people want to see. And of course it actually isn’t what people want to see. I want to see interesting faces. I want to see different bodies. I want to see people I can relate to. There’s nothing attractive about knowing a man has been flexing in front of a mirror five minutes before a scene. When did that become sexy? And I don’t want to see a woman looking starved to death. When did that become sexy? These are first world problems, It’s very easy as an actor to live in a bubble and think that life is about acting, and of course it’s not. It can turn you into a bit of a monster.”

Isn’t she awesome? I think so.

If you are an actor then check out my book How To Be a Successful Actor: Becoming an Actorpreneur. It is available in print and in all eBook formats on both Smashwords and Amazon.

Actresses Deserve Much More Than Being ‘The Girl’ And a Naked One At That

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film characters - anna paquinIn my other life as an actress I have noticed a worrying trend. Well, I say ‘trend’ but actually it has been going on for years: female parts in films were the character has no name and is called ‘The girl’. The girl is usually the only female part in the film and will also have at least one nude scene. Just because it is not humiliating enough to be offered a script where all of the men have names and you don’t, you also have to get your tits out. Nameless and objectified: actresses deserve better than this. WOMEN KIND deserves better than this.

It is hard to describe just how depressing it is to work in an industry where women are reduced constantly to the sum of their parts and not even named. the worrying thing is that this is a common practice. Upon complaining about this on my Facebook, prominent film maker and casting director Rory O’Donnell said: “This is incredibly common. I made fun of it when I wrote The Landlady and gave all the female characters first, last and nicknames and called the only male character ‘The Boyfriend’….but he did get a name during shooting.” If only there were more people like Rory. 

But what is to be done? Well we need more female filmmakers for a start. Here are some highlights from an amazing survey done by Stephen Follows on his must-read blog.

 

  • Between 2009-13, women made up 26.2% of crew members on British films.
  • This compares favourably with top US films over the same period (22.2%)
  • Of all the departments, the Transportation department is the most male, with only 7.7% women.
  • The only departments to have a majority of women are Make-up, Casting, Costume and Production.
  • Visual Effects is the largest department on most major movies and yet only has 16.5% women.
  • 6.4% of composers on UK films were women.
  • 14% of UK films had a female director, compared with 3% of top US films.
  • The percentage of women on British films has barely changed in the past five years.

 

Read more about his survey here. It was in all of the papers so Stephen is truly doing his part for equality.  I often get asked why I don’t leave the industry. The truth is I did take a little break. Of course if my agent had called during that period I would have not said no, but it was a quiet period and I took the moment to reflect on my chosen path. One of them anyway. I often think that if I did not have this magazine and did not make my own projects I might go slightly mad. Luckily I do and I can fight instead. I made Prose & Cons which had a strong female cast and I am making more films with my filmmaking partner Steve McAleavy. The way forward is not to quit the industry, not to let these men give our breasts the starring role while our actual talent is just a nameless supporting character: the key is to raise awareness and FIGHT. Get men to join the battle and equal the playing field. Women deserve more and we won’t stop until we get it. The fightback starts here.

 

Catherine Balavage is a writer, film director, actress and the owner and editor of this magazine. She is also a published author and wrote the book How To Be a Successful Actor: Becoming an Actorpreneur which has received rave reviews and is a must for actors everywhere.