During my years in casting, I came to understand how challenging the reaction audition was for many actors. Whether theatrical or commercial, the reaction audition demands that you use your facial expressions to nonverbally communicate very specific messages to the viewer, which indicates how you feel or think about someone or something.
Although challenging for most, what I noticed was that there was a small group of actors who were very consistent at getting the callback and booking the job. In fact, they were the inspiration for my first book, “Acting: Face to Face,” referred to as “the five percent.”
Years of research ultimately led me to the following six things these actors did to increase their callback and booking ratio, and set them apart from the rest:

1. They make it real. 
The top actors I studied had the ability to make their actions and reactions appear to be real. “Making it real” simply means that whatever they did or reacted to was infused with enough detail to make it look like real life.

Your reaction doesn’t stand alone; to get the callback and ultimately book the job, you must be skilled at executing the action and the reaction. In other words, you’re doing something (the action) and then something happens that makes you respond (the reaction) in a very real way.

2. They make it recognizable.
Your face is capable of making over 10,000 expressions. Many of them are meaningless, but those five percenters who always got callbacks and booked jobs? They intuitively knew how to choose the expressions that had meaning and were recognizable to all.

If they can’t recognize what’s on your face, how can they hire you?

3. They make it appropriate and adjustable. 
The third thing the five percent did differently was to make their expressions appropriate. By appropriate, I mean that the reaction they created was based on what was happening in the material or from a direction. It made sense and had the proper intensity. If the reaction was too big or too small, they could adjust it.

Think about it: If your reaction is random, or the intensity is too big or small, it won’t make sense to the viewer and will seem inappropriate for what’s taking place.

READ: “How to Make Auditions Dynamic”

4. They have one reaction at a time.
Most often, actors will try to create a reaction by recalling a time they felt something analogous to the circumstances, then hope the correct reaction will appear on their face. As they do this, other thoughts can cross their minds and those additional thoughts are reflected on their faces.  
Sometimes, those thoughts are accompanied by body movement. So even if the correct reaction is given, the extraneous movement of the face and body often makes the whole reaction too big, too busy, or unrecognizable.  
The group I studied didn’t try to show multiple facial movements at the same time. They employed one recognizable, appropriate facial reaction at a time.

5. They make it repeatable.
I also noticed that the five percent actors could repeat the reaction they gave because they were very aware of what their faces were saying. The actors who had this ability were in alignment with what they were feeling and revealing, making them more capable of consistently repeating exactly what they did.
If you can't repeat what worked, odds are you aren’t going to book the job. And if you do happen to book, there’s a chance you could lose the job by not being able to repeat on set what you did in the audition.

6. They can do it on demand. 
Finally, what those five percent actors were able to do was interpret material, make a choice, express that choice in a real, recognizable and appropriate way, and do it when asked. In other words, on demand. If they got an adjustment, they understood and executed it without losing any intensity or meaning.
If the reaction audition is a challenge for you, I suggest looking in your emotion toolbox to determine which of the skills here needs to be acquired and/or developed. Missing just one can be the difference between booking or not.

Mastering these six skills won’t guarantee entrance into the five percent club, but it does make you eligible for membership.
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John Sudol is a bicoastal audition coach, speaker and founder of the Emotion Training Center, and a Backstage Expert. For more information, check out Sudol’s full bio. ​

Having the skill to create a complex emotional life and reveal it on your face, in a real, recognizable, and appropriate way is the ultimate goal of an on-camera actor. 
Some actors seem to do this effortlessly while others struggle. If your emotional message fails to come across in the way you intend, there’s a good chance the answer can be found either in the way you’re attempting to evoke the emotion or in some kind of distortion taking place. For this article, I want to focus on the latter. 
By distortion, I mean anything that interferes with the creating or revealing of what you intend. Although there are many reasons your emotional message may be distorted, the following seven are the most common and important to the on-camera actor.

1. Your face. For some people, the structure of their face resembles an emotion. For example, a low brow with deep-set eyes may look like anger. Or the pulling down of the corners of the lips might make a person appear sad. Having the appearance of emotion on your face can confuse the viewer by sending the wrong message or the wrong level of intensity. 

2. How you are wired. Research shows that some people are born internalizers and others are externalizers. Externalizers are those people who show emotions on their faces, but have little change in their autonomic nervous system (ANS). Internalizers, on the other hand, tend to feel intensely (higher ANS response), while their faces remain blank.
Externalizers often hear things like, “Your face is too busy,” “You’re showing me what you feel,” or “You’re indicating.” Internalizers often hear things like, “I know you say you’re feeling it, but I’m not getting it,” or “It’s a lot easier to bring you down than it is to bring you up.” 

3. The culture you in which you were raised in. Where you were raised plays a big part not only in how you display certain emotions, but also when and to what degree. Adhering to your cultural norms doesn’t mean that as an actor you’re not capable of experiencing a particular emotion. More than likely you’ve just been trained to control or modify it, and as a result, it wouldn’t be a choice you’d make. Why? Expressing it doesn’t feel right to you. 

4. Family idiosyncrasies. Families are full of expression rules. Growing up, you may have me told to “Smile at the nice man,” so as a kid you learned the rule, and even though you didn’t particularly feel anything, you smiled at the nice man. Now as an adult, you may still be smiling at the nice man, whether you want to or not. Sometimes you may know you’re smiling, but a lot of the time, you don’t.

5. Your psychology. Experiences and observations over time can be responsible for how you perceive and react to a given event. These unique experiences and observations have created your beliefs. When something of importance happens in your life, these beliefs clue you in on how you should behave, what you should think, and even how you should feel. These beliefs are often responsible for what an actor is willing or not willing to emotionally reveal. 

6. How you listen. Literal versus inferential. This is how you take in information. Literal listeners take the things they hear at face value and don’t read anything into what is said. They take the words very literally. Inferential listeners, on the other hand, will try to work out what they think was meant by what was said, put their own interpretation on it, and often assume it implies some action that needs to be taken by them.
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7. Inappropriate triggers. This is unknowingly choosing stimuli that is inappropriate for what is taking place. Consciously you believe you feel one way, but unconsciously you feel something else. You might believe you were angry about a breakup, but the truth is you really feel sad. So while you’re focusing on what you think will make you angry, your face is revealing the truth about how you really feel.
Distortions are not about being truthful or honest. They are about our wiring and well-ingrained habits that distort the truth. They are insidious and most often misdiagnosed. If you have found that although you feel connected to the emotional experience, there is often a significant difference between what you’re feeling and what your face is expressing, I suggest you begin exploring any one of these distortions. 
Having an awareness and gaining the necessary tools to compensate and/or adjust is the first step in overcoming them and getting your emotional message across in the way you intend.