A longtime casting director-cum-acting coach is hoping to offer a fresh perspective for actors whose confidence may have been shaken after watching a viral interview with an Atlanta CD who admitted to only devoting four seconds to self-tapes.
Risa Bramon Garcia, whose vast credits include casting SEAL Team, The Affair, Masters of Sex and CSI: NY, filmed her own video for social media that acknowledges last week’s “insensitive” discussion between CDs Rhavynn Drummer and Tiffany Roshae. In the now-deleted video, Drummer laughs out loud as she listens to fellow casting director Roshae admitting to giving very little time to audition tapes.
“I’m dead serious,” Roshae, whose credits include the BET limited series Zatima, tells Drummer. “Does it take eight seconds to figure out if it’s a man or a woman? Does it take 10 seconds to figure out if it’s an Amazon driver or a surgeon? No. When someone shows up as they are, they show up as they are. That’s the human process. So when I come across a tape, and they are what they are from second one, from beginning, yeah, they’re in character. They’re telling the story. That’s what I’m hiring them to do. I’m not waiting to figure out if they can convince me if they can do the job.”
In a recent IG video of her own, Garcia acknowledged that the video “brought up a lot of feelings for people” and that it was “flip … and an insult to all of us in the work that we do together.” (Drummer and Roshae posted a subsequent video you can find here). The initial video renewed fears among actors who believe their self-tapes are not being watched.
But Garcia, who co-runs The BGB Studio, goes on to suggest that this can be viewed as an “awakening, an eye opening, an invitation for you to figure out how to show up in those first few seconds so that you are present and alive in the story and open, vulnerable, available.” Watch below.
In a conversation with Deadline, Garcia says she wasn’t trying to double down on this notion that spending four seconds viewing a self-tape is anywhere near acceptable. But she would like actors to “take responsibility for the work” they’re putting out there.
“I want actors to take that leadership and that authority, that responsibility and embrace the self-tape experience as their little mini movie that they’re offering us,” she says. “Yeah, it’s a lot of f–king work. I get it. And there’s no feedback. And it’s really frustrating. And I feel that.”
“In a way, it kind of ripped open this disconnect that has happened since self tapes and since the strikes,” she continues. “What I’m saying is that it’s an invitation to re-examine how to start a scene with more presence and more generosity and more being there in real time. I’ve been casting for decades, and I’ve been teaching for a long time, and I come across this all the time. There are actors I know who are like, ‘well, give me about a minute to warm up and then maybe I’ll get there.’ Or there’s like, ‘I need to get the first take out of my system and maybe by the second or third take, if you tell me what to do, I’ll get there.’ We have to move faster. Not four seconds fast, but we have to start thinking about how much is on a casting director’s plate. You want to grab someone’s attention when an actor walks on stage, when an actor walks on set, when the cameras roll. That takes championship level work.”
“I believe every actor can get there, but it takes training, it takes practice, it takes a different mindset,” adds Garcia. “So what I’m trying to invite actors to do is, instead of looking at this as casting directors are not watching us, they’re not inviting us, they’re not paying attention to us, there’s stuff you can do to engage the person watching so that it’s easier for all of us. I think that’s an exciting moment to be able to have respect for each other, but more than anything, respect for the work we’re doing and respect for each other, and respect for each other’s time.”
Meanwhile, an actor named Matthew Cornwell who runs an audition taping service in Georgia, posted his own video on YouTube that seems to echo what Garcia is saying.
“There’s a burden on you, the actor, to understand your job,” says Cornwell of Get Taped. “You need to be darn good at reflecting humanity back to the audience, raw humanity, where it’s a one liner or eight pages. If you haven’t accessed that truth before the record button has been hit, then quite frankly, you have not earned more than four seconds of their time.
