How to Make an Acting Resume (Even with No Experience)

The open call says “bring a headshot and resume.” You have a headshot, more or less. The resume is a blank page with your name at the top and a growing feeling that there’s nothing to put under it.

Every actor has been there, and the people reading know what a first resume looks like. They aren’t looking for a long list. They’re looking for a page that’s clean, honest, and easy to read in a few seconds, with enough on it to suggest you’re serious.

The short version: an acting resume is one page, built from a fixed set of sections in a familiar order. With no professional credits, your training and skills carry the page, and student, community, and self-made work fill the credits honestly. In the US it’s a resume trimmed to 8 x 10 and stapled to your headshot; in the UK it’s an acting CV with a playing age in your details. Never pad it. A short true page beats a long false one every time.

What goes on an acting resume, from top to bottom

Acting resumes don’t look like office resumes. There’s no objective statement and no work history from the coffee shop. Casting reads them fast, so the layout is close to standard across the US:

• Your name, large, at the top: the name you work under.
• Your union status under it: SAG-AFTRA, AEA, eligible, or non-union.
• Contact details: your agent’s or manager’s if you have one, otherwise your own phone number and a professional email. Never your home address.
• Height, hair color, and eye color.
• Credits, grouped by medium: film, television, theater, then commercials, new media, and other work.
• Training: schools, programs, classes, and teachers.
• Special skills: accents, languages, sports, instruments, licenses.

Each credit is one row in three columns: the title, your role, and the company, director, or venue. In the middle column, theater credits usually show your character’s name. Screen credits usually show billing instead: lead, supporting, or featured for film, and series regular, recurring, guest star, or co-star for television. If a co-star audition is your way in, here’s how to audition for a co-star role.

Put the medium you’re chasing first. A stage actor leads with theater; someone pursuing film and TV leads with screen credits, even if there are fewer of them. Within each group, strongest credits first.

What to list when you have no credits

“No experience” usually means “no professional experience.” Almost everyone has something. These all count, as long as you label them honestly:

• School, college, and university productions, with the school as the company.
• Community and amateur theater.
• Student films, especially from film schools, where the director is a student.
• Staged readings, devised pieces, and showcase scenes.
• Web series and short films you made with friends, if they’re finished and watchable.

UK advice points the same way. Aberystwyth University’s careers help sheet on the acting CV suggests that if you have very little professional work, you include university, college, and amateur productions.

What to leave off: background work, and above all background work dressed up as “featured”. Agent Guy Kochlani, in a Backstage interview about how his agency finds new talent, warns against inflating credits: a featured extra is not a major role. In the same piece, his partner Todd Eskin says a resume with only independent work doesn’t rule out a talented actor. Thin is fine. Fake isn’t.

Make training and skills carry the page

With few credits, the training section is where a reader sees that you’re serious. List your serious classes, with the teacher or school and the technique or subject: scene study, Meisner, voice, movement, on-camera, Shakespeare. If you have a degree or drama school training, it’s the natural first line of the section.

Special skills are the other half. Backstage’s piece on special skills and “no-no” skills advises that you list skills you can actually perform on stage or screen, and don’t overstate your level. That means “conversational Spanish” if it’s conversational, and “guitar (basic chords)” if that’s where you are.

A useful test: could you do it in the room today if someone asked? If you write “fluent French” or “juggling,” expect that someone might. Accents work the same way. Name the specific ones you do well (“Standard British,” “New York”) rather than a vague catch-all.

A beginner’s resume, laid out

Here is how a first resume might look for a made-up actor with no professional credits who is mainly after stage work, so theater comes first. Every line is something a beginner could honestly have:

• Jordan Park · Non-Union · [phone] · [professional email] · 5’9” · Brown hair · Brown eyes
• Theater: A Doll’s House, Krogstad, City College Theater Dept. · Twelfth Night, Sebastian, Riverside Community Players
• Film: Last Train (short), Lead, dir. A. Chen, State University Film School
• Training: AA in Theater, City College · Scene Study, two years, with M. Lopez · Meisner foundations, eight weeks, with R. Okafor · On-camera audition workshop, Downtown Actors Studio
• Special skills: Conversational Korean · Basic stage combat · Guitar (basic chords) · Driver’s license

On the real page, each credit gets its own row in three columns, and there’s plenty of white space. Nothing on it is impressive on its own. Together it says: trained, working, honest, and ready to be seen. If you’d like to skip the formatting, our free acting resume builder lays out the sections for you, lets you reorder them, and prints at 8 x 10 or saves a PDF.

US resume or UK acting CV?

The content is similar on both sides of the Atlantic, but the conventions differ in a few places that matter.

Guides to the UK CV, such as Backstage’s guide to creating a UK acting CV, list a playing age, the range of ages you can believably play. Be realistic about it. Kochlani’s advice in the interview above applies here too: he asks actors to be realistic about their age range.

Spotlight, the main UK casting directory, generally asks for accredited training or professional credits before you can join, so a first CV often goes out as a PDF on its own.

Size, stapling, and sending it

In the US, a printed resume goes on the back of your 8 x 10 headshot. Trim it to 8 x 10, as the University of Maine’s acting resume guide describes, so no edge sticks out. Keep it to one page. If it won’t fit, cut your weakest credits. If you need new photos first, see our guide to acting headshots.

Guides disagree on stapling. Catawba College’s entertainment industry resume guide suggests staples at the center top and bottom, taking care not to staple over your text; others say all four corners. Either way, both sides face out, so casting can flip from your face to your credits. Some actors skip staples and print the resume straight onto the back of the headshot.

Online, send a PDF. Backstage’s anonymous agent columnist, in his advice on agent submissions, suggests a PDF resume alongside no more than three headshots, and the Maine guide also asks for a PDF.

Keep it honest, and keep it current

An acting resume is small, but every line on it is a claim someone can ask you about. A credit you inflated can come up in the room in the most ordinary way: “Oh, you were in that? What was it like working with the director?”

• List only work you did, with the billing you actually had.
• Only claim a union status you hold. As Backstage’s guide to becoming SAG-eligible explains, eligible means you qualify to join the union, not that you’ve joined.
• Only list skills you can do today, at the level you wrote.
• Update the page after every job, and drop the smallest credits as better ones arrive.

The fastest way to grow the page is to keep auditioning. Every student film, reading, and community show you book becomes a line. Our guide to getting an acting agent with no experience covers what to send once the page has some weight, and how to tell a real agency from a scam. When you book a show, the program will want a short bio too, and our guide to writing an actor bio shows how to build one.

When the resume starts getting you in the room, the sides follow. Offbook helps you prepare them: upload the sides, pick your role, and realistic voices read every other character, and Offbook listens while you say your lines and plays the next cue when you finish. Rehearse on your laptop with the full script on a big screen, and listen to your scenes on your phone anywhere.

Questions actors ask

Can an acting resume be two pages?

No. Keep it to one page that fits on the back of an 8 x 10 headshot. If you have more than a page of credits, cut the weakest ones.

Should I put my age on an acting resume?

In the US, usually not; the headshot does that job. On a UK CV, list a playing age range you can honestly play rather than your actual age.

Do I list a job I did under an NDA?

Read the agreement first, because what it covers varies from project to project. If you’re not sure, ask the production what you can list and when, and use the title they give you.

Should I include extra or background work?

Leave it off. Background work isn’t a role, and listing it as “featured” is exactly the kind of inflation agents warn about.

What if I only have school plays?

List them with the school as the company, put your training above them, and fill out a real skills section. That’s a normal first resume, and everyone reading it knows it.