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Although I’d like to think I was an actor in another life, realistically, there’s one reason why it would never work out for me: Auditioning. The concept of auditions sounds like the most terrifying thing in the entire world, especially when the odds are stacked against you (and when you’re an actor, they kind of are).
So it’s no wonder that even the best actors have openly discussed failing miserably at auditions before. It turns out that persistence and luck might be just as important as technical prowess when it comes to auditioning for TV and movies, because many of them have also spoken about having terrible auditions for roles they ended up getting.
For all of these actors, it definitely worked out in the end, because I truly can’t imagine any of these shows or movies without them in it — but it’s safe to say they may not have been so convincing at first…
1.
Brittany Snow recently admitted that she “bombed” her Hairspray audition. “I did terribly,” she said. “I got really in my head; I got really nervous, and my voice cracked. I did pretty well at the dancing, but the singing part was really awful for me.” After her audition, the director called her and admitted “Well, that wasn’t great” — but told her that Michelle Pfeiffer was going to be in the movie, and “it would’ve been really iconic if you were both in it.”
But she didn’t quit there — because she remembered that a psychic told her two years before that she’d play the daughter of “an iconic, beautiful blonde woman” in a “huge movie.” AKA Michelle Pfeiffer. So Brittany called the director back and told him all about her psychic, which landed her another audition.
2.
Lea Michele is still arguably best-known for playing Rachel Berry in Glee — and her audition was a wild ride. “My first audition was a disaster. First, I went in and the piano player messed up my song. I, like, got so nervous and freaked out. Then, they were laughing at this scene that, in my mind, was serious,” she said.
“I left and I thought that it went terribly. Little did I know, throughout my audition, I was kind of doing a lot of — what was and became — Rachel Berry.” And if that isn’t the most perfect story you’ve ever heard, I don’t know what is.
3.
Robert Pattinson (SWOOOOOON) was definitely not confident about his Twilight audition, but for a reason you probably wouldn’t expect. To help combat his “absolute terror of auditions,” he decided to take a Valium on the day of his Twilight audition. “I had never taken a Valium before,” he admitted.
“I just remember feeling so glorious in the back of the taxi with the window open and just being like, ‘Wow, this is what I’ve been missing.’ I think I had this quite spacey, detached kind of thing in the audition, which must have worked for the character.” So, there ya go! Edward’s “spacey” vibe is because of Valium. Indirectly.
4.
Zach Braff’s first audition for Scrubs was supposedly “so bad,” the show’s creator Bill Lawrence “threw it out after 8 seconds.” But that wasn’t the end, of course. Here’s Zach’s side of the story: “I was very hungover. I went in, I definitely did a shitty audition, and they said the tape went out to LA. Then I got back to LA and there was no response from my tape. And my agent said, ‘This is crazy; they still haven’t found this guy. I don’t even think they’ll know; just go in again.’” And he did!
Luckily, Zach didn’t make the same mistakes again. “This time, I prepared. This time, I got the right script; it made me fuckin’ laugh. It was totally my sense of humour.” And after looking for the right actor to play J.D. for a “long time,” they knew they wanted Zach Braff right away. And I get it. The man is incredible as J.D.
5.
Even if you never watched The Vampire Diaries, you know Ian Somerhalder was a top-tier heartthrob in the early 2010s, and there’s nobody else who could’ve been Damon in that show. And he knew it, too. “I knew this was my role,” he said. But unfortunately, his first audition wasn’t the greatest. “Whether it was too much coffee, that B12 shot I gave myself, who knows? I bombed it,” he said. “I did what I thought I needed to do, and I left feeling awful. Guess what? It wasn’t good enough.”
“I had to go back and re-test because our big boss, [CBS president] Les Moonves, did not buy it, the fact that I was Damon. And I wanted to jump off of a building.” But hey, it ended up working out! Because “after 10 days of virtual hell” of auditioning, he got the role. Ends justify the means, I suppose?
6.
Ready to have your mind blown? Aaron Paul thought his Breaking Bad audition was horrible. “When I got Breaking Bad I was at the — I mean, really, the lowest point in my career, just in terms of finances. I just didn’t know where my next check was gonna come in,” he said, which obviously put more pressure on the audition. And even all these years later, Aaron still characterizes it as “awful.”
In the audition, he forgets a line and apologizes for it. “I go, ‘I’m sorry. This is terrible,’” Aaron recalled. “You see me apologize. I’m just like, ‘Oh my god. I just fucked this up. And so I walk out and I’m just biting my nails, because I’m desperate.” But after all that, he didn’t only get a callback, but also a 1:1 “advice” chat with Vince Gilligan, the show’s creator.
7.
On the other hand, Chris Hemsworth initially did think he aced his Thor audition…but after not hearing back for awhile — and hearing that his younger brother Liam “got a call back” for the same role — he concluded, “I don’t know. I blew my audition I guess.” So his manager got in touch with the casting team to let them know he’s Liam’s older brother, which got him another audition.
“That second audition was a lot different than my first one. I came in kind of with a little, I guess, motivation and maybe frustration that my little brother had gotten further than me,” he said. “It’s a little family, sibling rivalry sort of kicked up in me. Then it moved pretty quick from there.”
8.
Dominic Fike is seriously one of my favourite singers ever…but many people only recognize him as Elliot from Euphoria. Anyway, his audition? Let’s just say Dom didn’t appear to take it very seriously. “I stayed up all night with this girl drinking whiskey, taking shrooms. I show up to the audition, or the read, beyond fucked up,” he said. “I’m just laughing at Sam [Levinson, the director], and everyone’s laughing at me because I’m just laughing at them.” He admitted that he didn’t know what Euphoria was at the time, nor did he know Zendaya or Barbie Ferreira.
“We started reading it, but then the words started jumping around on the page. I was like, ‘I can’t do this script.’ And they were like, ‘Dom, just go get rest,’” he recalled. “And they were so mad at me. I remember they called my agents and were like, ‘This kid’s never doing anything in Hollywood again, ever. We’re so mad.’” But a year later, Sam rewrote the character to match Dominic’s audition — “with the qualities of the guy who he saw show up.”
9.
After Neil Patrick Harris read the character description for Barney Stinson in How I Met Your Mother, he thought, “I’m not gonna get this job.” So what did that mean? He “didn’t really care.” He explained how he auditioned with the laser-tag scene: “I think I did a dive roll and knocked into their desk.” Which, yanno, isn’t the most professional thing ever.
But although it wasn’t exactly what they were initially looking for, the writers liked it. “As good writers do, they thought, ‘It doesn’t have to be this. It could actually maybe be this.’ And I thought it would just be the pilot and would never go.”
10.
I don’t know about you, but when I think of Sean Penn, I think of Fast Times at Ridgemont High… And his audition story is almost as notorious as his performance in the film. Sean admitted that while he’s “awful” at auditioning, at the same time, he “had a kind of feeling of entitlement as an actor” at the time. So, that meant he had “an awful lot of confidence” going into the audition. But alas: “I auditioned terribly, flat, and I knew I wasn’t willing to do the music of this character that I thought it was,” he said.
But the casting team wasn’t done with him, thankfully. They ran after him in the parking lot and told him, “Get back in here and audition your ass off” — without the attitude, this time. And it worked!
11.
If you don’t like In The Heights, you’re wrong… And one of the best parts of that movie is Anthony Ramos. But did you know that, according to Anthony himself, his audition kinda sucked? “I bombed that audition,” he said. “It was, like, horrible.” But he ended up being able to start fresh when the movie switched studios. “I was like, yo, I hope they burned that audition tape,” Anthony said. “I hope someone burned that shit, and it’s somewhere deep down in the archives where no one can find it.
So I guess the question is, did the director, Jon M. Chu, ever see his original audition? The answer is no. “Either it was so bad that it got buried and was never shown to me, or… Who knows how it got lost in the shuffle,” Jon said. All I know is, I’m glad it happened.
12.
The 2020 Mulan movie has a similar story, starring Jason Scott Lee as the antagonist. He recalls the “long” process: “It came first as a Skype audition, and I think Skype auditions are completely botched. It was terrible. I came off very bad, and it’s funny because they ended up passing on me.” He remembered feeling like he was “flying blind” because of the limited material he was given before audition.
After almost a year of “radio silence” and Jason’s assumption that they were going with another actor, they told him, “We want you to do another taping. And this time, it’s going to be different.” He was told he had to fly to New Zealand for his audition, and then “stay down there and start pre-production” if they wanted him. And they did! Turns out his “terrible” Skype audition wasn’t the be-all, end-all.
13.
Emilia Clarke, who played Daenerys Targaryen in Game of Thrones, had a rather weird end to her audition, which she explained on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. “There were lots of people from HBO there, and I was kind of anxious and did all of the scenes.” Then, at the end, she asked them if she could do anything else, and they suggested she “do a dance.” So what did she do? She did a dance. “I don’t know how to do it, but I did the funky chicken. And it kind of morphed into the robot.”
Although it was unconventional and ridiculous, it the risk paid off. “I sort of heard some laugher going on, and I thought, ‘Comedy gold, this is brilliant!’” But when the audience asked her to recreate her audition dance, she said, “I can’t. It’s terrible.” So there you have it: Sometimes performing badly on purpose wins you the part!
14.
You might know Teresa Palmer from A Discovery of Witches or Warm Bodies, but she was also in the 2016 war drama Hacksaw Ridge alongside Andrew Garfield, directed by Mel Gibson. The audition started with a “horrendous” Skype meeting with Mel, which was a “disastrous” miscommunication that left Mel waiting for Teresa for over half an hour — and once she did get on the call, her computer froze, then her iPhone died, then her iPad died. And if that isn’t enough: “I hadn’t read the script in six months. I just had to wing it,” she said.
But I guess Mel liked her authenticity. “I somehow got the movie from that,” she said. “But I had put myself on tape a few months earlier and I hadn’t heard anything so I didn’t think I’d got it. I was such a flustered mess. I was like, ‘I’m so sorry! Nothing’s charged, everything’s breaking, this is the most horrendous thing.’ And he was chuckling and he’s like, ‘I like you, you’re real.’”
15.
Leonardo DiCaprio is one of the GOATs, so it’s hard to imagine any of his auditions going “badly.” But there was definitely some tension surrounding his Titanic audition, specifically at his screen test with Kate Winslet. After he “charmed” everybody at his first audition, Leo came back to read with Kate. But according to James Cameron, Leo “didn’t know he was going to test,” and responded with, “Oh, I don’t read.” So what did James do? “I shook his hand and said, ‘Thanks for coming by,’” he recalled.
But thankfully, Leo caught on and said, “Wait, wait, wait. If I don’t read, I don’t get the part? Just like that?” to which James essentially told him that, yep, he’d have to do the screen test right then and there. “So he comes in, and he’s like every ounce of his entire being is just so negative — right up until I said, ‘Action,’” James said. “Then he turned into Jack.” It’s at that moment when James thought, “All right. He’s the guy.”
So hey, take this as your sign to never give up, I guess! Did any of these surprise you? Which audition are you dying to see the most? Tell me in the comments below!
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