An ad came across my feed a while back from a guy selling acting coaching, and the pitch was that he could help you book more, and the whole page was built around that promise. Book more. More auditions turning into offers, more callbacks turning into work. I looked him up on IMDb before I did anything else, because that is a thirty second check and there is no reason not to do it, and he had two credits, both from the 1980s.
I want to be careful here, because the obvious version of this post is that the guy is a fraud and you should count credits before you hand anybody money, and that is not quite what I think.
Credits Are a Bad Way to Judge a Teacher
Credits are a bad way to judge a teacher. Some of the best coaches I have worked with had modest careers as performers, and a few of them will tell you straight out that they were never going to make it as actors and that is exactly why they got good at breaking down what makes an audition work. Doing a thing and explaining a thing are two different skills, and the people who are elite at one are frequently mediocre at the other. If a coach is running a scene study class and you leave every week with a better handle on your own instrument, the size of their filmography does not matter to me at all. You are buying instruction and you can evaluate instruction directly by sitting in the room.
The Promise Is the Problem
What got my attention was the specific claim. He was selling an outcome, and the outcome he named was bookings, and that is a business claim, and business claims need business evidence. This is where the two credits start to matter after all. A thin filmography does not disqualify anybody from teaching craft. It becomes relevant the second somebody promises to deliver bookings, because now he is claiming expertise in the exact part of the job he has never done. If the method works, he has had forty years to run it on himself. He could not book with it, and he is charging you to book with it, and I do not know a polite way to say that two jobs during the Reagan administration is not proof of anything.
The Questions to Ask Before You Pay
If somebody tells you they can help you book, the question is not what did you book, it is who have you helped book, and when. Not a testimonials page, because I can write you a testimonials page in an afternoon, and half the ones I have read online read like they came out of the same generator. Ask for two current students you can actually talk to. Ask what those students booked in the last twelve months and whether the coaching came before or after. Ask how many students he has worked with total, because five wins out of five hundred people is a different business than five out of twelve. Anybody who is genuinely producing results for people will have those names ready and will be happy to hand them over, and anybody who gets cagey about it has told you what you needed to know.
Why This Works on Us
The reason this stuff works is not that actors are gullible. It is that paying money feels like doing something, and when you are two years in and the auditions are not converting and you cannot point to a single thing you did that week that moved the needle, spending four hundred dollars on somebody who says he has the answer is a relief. I have done it. I have bought things that were essentially the sensation of taking action, and I did not admit that to myself at the time, and the money was gone either way. The industry has a whole economy built on people who are anxious and want to feel like they are progressing, and the coaching corner of it is one piece, and the paid audition workshop corner is another, and there are more.
By my own standard I should say this about myself too. I write posts like this one, and I put opinions about the business on a blog, and the honest thing is to tell you that I got serious about acting three and a half years ago, that I have never been in the fourteen percent, and that the reason I can produce my own films is that I still work a rotation offshore. So weigh what I say accordingly. I am not selling you a class and I do not have a program, and if I ever do, hold me to the same questions I just listed.
What a Coach Can Actually Give You
I will put my position on it flatly. Anybody advertising that he will help you book more is selling something he cannot deliver, and I have not seen an exception yet. The only thing a coach can actually give you is craft. He can make you better, and better is worth paying for, and a better actor will over time convert more of the rooms he gets into. The booking itself runs on things that have nothing to do with you. It runs on your look standing next to the guy they already cast, on the budget, on the role getting rewritten between the first audition and the callback, on somebody’s nephew, on your availability the week they need you, on the director having a feeling in the room that he could not explain to you if you asked him. You can give the best read in the session and go home with nothing, and that happens constantly, and it is not a failure of technique. There is no system for that part, which is why nobody who is honest sells one.
None of this means skip coaching. Get in a good class, work with somebody whose students you have actually seen work, and pay for the reps and the room and the eyes on you, because all of that is real and it is worth money. Just know what you are buying when you buy it. Technique is something a teacher can give you. Bookings are not, and anybody who says otherwise is selling the one thing nobody in this business controls.
