Los Angeles-based casting director April Webster is known for her warm and welcoming manner with actors. She loves to create a supportive environment, viewing herself as their advocate. The Emmy-winning casting director has a gift for casting ensembles that feel distinctly real, memorable, and engaging. Webster’s endless casting credits include “Star Wars: Episode IX – The Rise of Skywalker,” “Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens,” “Star Trek,” “Mission: Impossible III,” “Tomorrowland,” “Lost” and “Alias.”
Among the talents she plucked from obscurity are Olivia Cooke in the “Bates Motel” series, and Evangeline Lilly who broke out as Kate Austen in the television series “Lost.” Lilly would later go on to play Tauriel in “The Hobbit” film series and then the Wasp/Hope van Dyne in the Marvel Universe. Also, back when young Kevin Costner was non-union, she helped cast him in his first starring role in the film “Double Down,” also known by the title “Stacy’s Knights.”
Here are Webster’s tips for aspiring actors.
Understand the level of commitment an acting career requires
“Understand how much work it is. It’s not something you can enter into lightly. It takes a lot of commitment and passion to go into an acting career,” Webster asserts. “There’s classes, there’s keeping up a certain physicality so that you’re healthy and you’re available. And it’s doing inside work so that you’re accessible and able to be available to the camera and to your other actors.” Keeping up with professional headshots, travel expenses, and clothing are essential to the field as well. “You have to be totally passionate about it; there’s nothing else you want to do,” she told Acting Career Start Up.
Get some experience
Webster advises aspiring talent to join a local theater company, saying, “I would tell them to get some experience so they have some base.” She continues, “If you want to submerge yourself, yes, you can go to [Los Angeles or New York] and go to classes and things like that. But you can’t be attached to an outcome of what’s going to happen there.”
Webster’s audition advice
Webster says, “I think the best thing actors can do for themselves when they’re coming in for an audition is to know the material, have made some choices … to have made a decision about what the material is and be able to be flexible enough to make a shift on that.” She assures performers that they’re enough just as they are.
Receive direction with a sense of play
When she gives direction to actors, it indicates her investment in them as performers. In other words, it’s not a critique of their first take, but rather the direction reveals that she sees potential in them. Also, Webster loves to read with actors to see what they give her in their performance and personality, as well as get a sense of how connected they are in the process.
Spread your energy
While she acknowledges some things fall outside an actor’s control in the audition room, Webster emphasizes the undeniable impact actors can have over everyone present at the audition. With this in mind, she encourages actors to “spread your energy over the room.”
She explains,”What I mean is that you don’t have to be just affected by the room, by what’s happening there, because they just lost a million dollars of the budget or whatever else it happens to be. You can draw the focus and get everybody centered … So if you come in and really take the room, then even if the audition wasn’t exactly spot-on, we will remember. We’ll say, ‘Remember that person? They just were so present in the room.’ And I’ve cast people who we’ve seen in one movie audition two years later in another film.”
Self-tapes
Webster advises actors to refrain from sending out unsolicited materials to casting directors.
“If I was an actor, I would not send out unsolicited material,” she cautions. “We often get material that has been not requested. And my policy generally is to not look at it. If I happen to look at it and you happen to be right, then I might take it further. But it’s really kind of a violation in a way; it’s not something that you do.”
Continuing, she offers the following advice in creating quality self-tapes: “Make sure that you have good lighting, that you have good sound, and that you get yourself a good reader.” When actors perform their lines solo—that is, without the other half of the dialogue being read aloud by a scene partner—it can be particularly distracting for producers. So it’s worth putting in the extra effort to find a good reader as much as possible.
One advantage to self-tapes, Webster says, is that they allow actors to do multiple takes in order to put their best foot forward. “But you don’t want to get crazy though,” she warns. Her office usually asks actors to submit two takes, “Because that way, you can give us something a little bit different, which might give us a different way of looking at your audition.”
Live a full life
The most important advice Webster likes to give actors is: “Have a full, rich life. Go to museums, go to movies, go to other countries. Learn to speak other languages. You want to enter into other cultures so you can be empathetic to other people. And as an actor, as an artist, that’s something that’s so important.” Webster firmly believes whatever actors experience in their lives —in regard to both their acting careers and their personal lives—is of value and makes each individual unique. “It’s all about interaction. It’s always about communication.”
Let your love for the dramatic arts lead you
Webster felt like an outsider while growing up, but was thrilled when she discovered the theater community while building sets for high school productions. Indeed, she found a sense of belonging, which continues to this day. Webster says it’s “almost like belonging to a church. No matter where you go, you have a family; you have a place to go.”
As a young woman hitchhiking through Europe, she offered to volunteer at a theater in Amsterdam. “I was willing to do anything to be there,” she recalls. They took her up on her offer; Webster ended up serving as the stage manager for a multimedia show at the Holland Festival that summer.
Taking this can-do spirit everywhere she went, she continued to broaden all aspects of her theater skills amidst the 1970s New York theater scene, working as a stage manager, actress, mask maker, set builder, prop and wardrobe master, and theater director.
“When you have learned a process, and you continue to learn the process … all of the parts add up to the whole. Everything that you’ve done in your life applies to what you’re doing now,” she insists. Eventually, Webster discovered her perfect fit with the profession of casting.
