The internet is very opinionated
If you spend long enough reading acting forums or watching YouTube videos about headshots, you’ll risk convincing (and depressing!) yourself that casting directors are each looking for something completely different.
Some people will tell you never to smile. Others insist you should always smile. Some swear by cinematic, professional lighting. Others say it should be completely natural. Then there are endless debates about backgrounds, focal lengths, colours, retouching… it’s enough to make you wonder whether there’s a secret formula everyone else knows. In my experience, there isn’t.
The best actor headshots have one thing in common: they feel completely true to the person who appears in them. And sorry if that sounds frustratingly vague, but I think it’s much more useful than trying to follow a list of arbitrary rules.
But what I definitely know, having worked with many West End casting directors for the best part of the decade, is they aren’t looking for a flawless image to put on a billboard. They’re looking for an actor they’d like to bring into the room.
a headshot isn't an audition. it's an introduction.
Actors often put enormous pressure on a headshot to do everything at once. Show range, suggest different casting types, stand out from everybody else’s, look cinematic, look expensive, look like the sort of photograph that wins photography awards.
Personally, I think that’s asking far too much of a single image (and also of yourself – as an actor). And it’s forgetting that casting directors do indeed have imaginations – and can picture you with different facial expressions, or embodying a character very different from your own.
For me, a headshot is successful if it just makes somebody want to meet you. Not because you’ve created an air of mystery or you’ve managed to squeeze five different emotions into one expression, but just because you look like a real, interesting person who could bring something interesting to the role and the audition room and could work collaboratively with the director and creative team to achieve something amazing.
Your audition gets you cast. Your headshot gets you seen.
