Best Body Language Tips For Actors
As an actor, body language plays a crucial role in your overall success in auditions, role play and performance.
Follow our body language acting tips to showcase your natural talents, level-up your communication mastery and become the most memorable person in the room.
To have a successful audition, use your body language to showcase your acting skills. The first step is to analyse how you currently use your body. For example, ask your self the following questions.
- 1. What can I do to prepare for an audition?
- 2. What facial expressions do I need to have before, during and after the audition?
- 3. How does my voice change when I slate or introduce myself to the casting director or producer?
- 4. What can I learn from my past auditions to land a role?
- 5. How can I change my body language for the better?
Once you ask yourself these questions, you can change your body language to land acting auditions.
1. Understand your surroundings
If you are doing an in-person audition, then make sure to understand your surroundings. It is often best to keep yourself 4 to 12 feet away from the casting director; This is the amount of space should be determined as soon as you walk into the room. It is enough space to be heard and have your whole body visible. Don’t stand too close to the director as you will look desperate and do not stand too far away as make you look afraid.
2. Use Purposeful Gazing
Confident performers and actors know the power of eye gazing. To increase your confidence, be sure to look people in the eye as you are speaking AND as they are speaking. Too often we look away, check our phone or scope out the rest of the room. This is not only rude, but very low confident.
When you walk into the audition room, keep your head up and look at the people conducting the interview. After you find your position, look at each person when you’re introducing yourself. It is essential not to shift your eyes too much and to never look down at the floor. By looking down at the floor and having shifty eyes makes it look like you are not comfortable and nervous.
Action Step: Use purposeful gazing and eye contact to your advantage. When you enter the audition room, keep your head up and look in front of you. After you plant yourself in your Launch Stance, look at who you’re introducing yourself to. Don’t shift your eyes too much and never look at the floor.
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3. Harness Confidence
Confidence is what will separate you from your competition. Believing you are the right person for the job increases trust and comfort levels between you and the production team. Here are a few ways to make yourself feel and appear more confident.
There’s a big confidence myth: Confidence is just one of those things that “you have or you don’t.” No way! It’s a skill, one that can be developed like any other skill, through intentional practice.
Your ability to display confidence increases trust and comfort levels with others. You can build confidence with your body language in many ways. Here are six ways to authentically develop inner confidence before your next audition:
- Harness your professional happiness.
- Create a pump-up playlist.
- Manage and deal with any social anxiety or performance anxiety.
- Write down three positive self-truths. These are the ideas we tell ourselves and the beliefs we carry around.
- Find a confidence role model who demonstrates leadership, isn’t afraid to be unique and communicates and interacts with everyone.
- Do a pre-performance routine…
4. Master Your Space
Researchers have found that how we use space can give us interesting information. Specifically:
The body to body distance between two parties encodes the nature of the relationship between the participants themselves as well as observing third parties. In other words, we use space to decide how someone feels about us and we look at space between others to try predicting their relationship.
Everyone has their own space bubbles. These are the areas around our body where we like to interact with different kinds of people. Everyone’s bubble is slightly different, but here are some averages:
- Intimate space is 0 to 18 inches from our body. People who are in that space have to be intimate with us because they are close enough to reach out and touch us. You never want to go into someone’s intimate space accidentally.
- Personal space is 1.5 to 5 feet from our body. This is the most common zone we use. We easily can reach out and shake hands and speak so someone can hear us. This is our favorite zone to use when talking to friends at a party or colleagues in the break room.
- Social space is 5 to 7 feet from our body. This often is used with people you feel are not a threat, but you are not necessarily interacting with them. It can be at a party or networking event or even in a large event space.
- Public space is beyond 7 feet. This gives us enough space to figure out someone’s intentions before an approach. At 7 feet, you can see their entire body, their hand gestures and posture. We like to get a good read on someone before talking to them.
Action Step: Practice safe space boundaries. Remain in the personal and social space zones with the casting director and other decision makers.
5. Practice how you position
How you stand is the way you stand that makes you look relaxed, comfortable and confident; This means having your head up, shoulders back, and knees slightly bent. Get into position once you figure out where you want to stand in the audition room or front of the camera for your video audition.