Oct 1, 2026 · 27 min · 14 segments
Actors are often taught to explore emotion—but what if emotion is actually the last part of scene preparation? In Episode #441 of Casting Actors Cast, casting director, actor, author and teacher Jeff…
Jeff DreisbachHost
Nobody needs to remove their Uta Hagen books from the shelf, and I'm certainly not showing up with stone tablets from the acting gods saying, "Good news, everybody.
It's really an organizational tool, a way many of the things actors already understand and putting them into an order that I think makes preparation clearer and much more playable.
Four things, but the order matters, because I think actors sometimes start at number four and then spend the entire audition trying to reverse engineer number one, two, and three.
So let's start with want, and right away I'm gonna use that word a little differently than actors normally do.
When actors hear want, they usually think, "What does my character want?" And that question has been part of acting training forever.
Why did the writer write this scene? What has happened here? What does the audience need to understand when this scene is over that they did not understand when it began? That is the writer's intention, and I think it's one of the most overlooked pieces of actor preparation, because actors are not only portraying people, we are telling stories.
Someone realizes that the person they trusted has been lying to them for 12 years, which is also known as Tuesday night television.
Nobody needs to remove their Uta Hagen books from the shelf, and I'm certainly not showing up with stone tablets from the acting gods saying, "Good news, everybody.
It's really an organizational tool, a way many of the things actors already understand and putting them into an order that I think makes preparation clearer and much more playable.
Four things, but the order matters, because I think actors sometimes start at number four and then spend the entire audition trying to reverse engineer number one, two, and three.
So let's start with want, and right away I'm gonna use that word a little differently than actors normally do.
When actors hear want, they usually think, "What does my character want?" And that question has been part of acting training forever.
Why did the writer write this scene? What has happened here? What does the audience need to understand when this scene is over that they did not understand when it began? That is the writer's intention, and I think it's one of the most overlooked pieces of actor preparation, because actors are not only portraying people, we are telling stories.
Someone realizes that the person they trusted has been lying to them for 12 years, which is also known as Tuesday night television.
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