What to Put on Your Acting Resume

After taking acting lessons for a while, you may feel confident enough that you want to begin acting in shows professionally or at the collegiate level. When this time comes, you will need an acting resume. You will hand this in along with a headshot to the casting director at each audition you go to. Think of your resume as part of your first impression. When they see you in the audition room, they only have about a 1-2 minute performance to go off of. The resume will help them gain a better understanding of your experience level, which will be vital to them placing you in an appropriate role. But acting resumes look different than academic or work resumes. So, here’s a look at what your acting resume should look like:

At the top of the page, you should write your name in big, bold letters. Choose a font that is clean and easy to read. Under your name, include your email address and phone number. Then, the following information is optional: hair color, eye color, height, weight, and vocal range. This information can be helpful to a casting director in remembering you when they are making final decisions, but it’s important not to list any information that you are not comfortable sharing. They will see you at the audition, so that information is not necessary when you are a beginning actor.

Underneath this information, the page should be divided into three major sections: Acting Experience, Education and Training, and Special Skills. When you first begin, the acting experience section should list all the roles you have played, no matter the part or where you performed it. After you begin to build a list of professional theaters you have worked with, you will begin to take out the roles you performed at a school. Regardless of what the roles are, this section should have three columns in it: a column naming the show, a column naming your role in the show, and a column naming either who directed the show or what theater it was performed at. So, for example, it should look like this:

Acting Experience:

Show A                    Character B                Theater C

Notice that the show title is italicized.

Education and Training:

The next section is Education and Training. In this section, you will list classes you’ve taken or topics you’ve learned about and the name of the person who taught you. For example, if you take acting lessons with Fox Music Showtime, you would write:

Acting: Eden Fox.

Why would this matter? The theater world is surprisingly small and interconnected. If you’re auditioning for someone who knows one of your teachers, that could give you an advantage in getting the part if your teacher has positive things to say about you.

Special Skills:

The final section of the resume is Special Skills. Here, you want to list anything you can do on stage that might make you an asset. For example, you could list some of the following things: British accent, riding a unicycle, fluent in Spanish, experienced in puppetry, proficient piano player. What is in this list will be completely different for each person, so think carefully about what you bring to the table.

You will need to always be updating your resume to only showcase the most impressive ones as you gain more experience. If you’re not sure where to start gaining experience, try a free Showtime acting lesson !