I just saw a young new actor’s website and he had some headshots on his home page (I will talk in another post soon about why I don’t think you should have your headshot on the home page of your website) and they are him in a sweater with a rather wrinkly white tshirt coming out the neck area. He was asking for advice about his headshots. Next to the headshots are “screen grabs” from student type films he has done and he is dressed in WAY more interesting clothes. A green army style jacket with a black t-shirt underneath, another shirt with a “I bought this tie for this job, tie” and a light plaid shirt kind of open .. ANYWAY… he looks like all kinds of people in his screen grabs. He looks like a student who is really smart and solving some problem, in another he looks like he could work in some boring office and flit with the cute girl, in another he looks a little troubled… so you get the picture. He is wearing a dark sweater in his headshots with a distracting t-shirt under it and then in the films he has done he has been dressed in all kinds of specific clothing that tells us not only his age range, but his class and maybe that he is a dramatic and intense actor.
SO… I wrote him some feedback and told him that those screen grabs were way more interesting than his headshots. He thanked me, and said he felt he should be a blank slate in his headshots, to let other people decide what kinds of characters he should play.
I wrote a fairly nice response back but I really want to say: WHY would you want to do that??? Why don’t you want to stand out? You are not a big star. There is no body of work for people to refer to so you need to define yourself and you don’t get very many chances to do that in this business so do it with your headshots! I am not saying that you can’t wear a sweater, but you do need GREAT headshots because otherwise you are just wasting a year of no one paying any attention to you. Don’t be VANILLA. Stand out but stand out in a way that makes it look like you actually know who you are and that you care about your career. If you are not a celebrity with a familiar face, if you are not a stunningly gorgeous human being, if you don’t have a killer agent who is calling casting to pitch and define you then you need an awesome headshot that says something about who you are.
I worked in casting, we never knew 100% what we were looking for, but we were always in the ballpark and I flipped through and ignored hundreds of headshots from actors who didn’t look like they were professional enough to bring in. We didn’t want to waste our time so we looked for actors that fit with in the pocket of the “type” we were after. Yes, we have huge imaginations, but we didn’t really need to use them because there are thousands of actors to look through. Why do I need to imagine that you could play a warm sweet character from your scowling submission photo when I have a thousand warm sweet looking photos. Unless you are already known, you HAVE to have specific shots that say different things. Why wouldn’t you want to???
Ok. Thanks for letting me vent about that 