I Have an Audition Tomorrow and Don’t Know My Lines: A Calm Overnight Plan

The email came in at 8:40 p.m. Sides attached, appointment at eleven tomorrow morning. You’ve read the scene once, and the only thing you’re sure of is that you don’t know it.

First, some perspective: this is a normal night in an actor’s life. Material often arrives late because scripts arrive late, and casting offices know it. Casting director Marci Liroff has written that when an actor tells her they only got the sides last night, her answer is “So did everyone else.” That isn’t a scolding. It means everyone in the waiting room is working against the same clock you are.

The short version of tonight: spend your first hour on the scene, not the words. Then learn the lines by testing yourself, stop at a set time and sleep, and use the morning to relearn, which is when the night’s work pays off. If you’re not word-perfect by eleven, hold the sides, and hold them well. Here’s how each step works and why.

What casting actually expects from you tomorrow

There’s no single rule, and anyone who gives you one is overselling. Liroff, who has worked in casting for nearly 40 years, says there are no hard and fast rules about holding sides. Her description of the US norm is still useful: be as off-book as you can, connect with the reader, and keep your sides handy, turning the pages along with the scene and using them as needed. She notes it’s different in the UK and Australia, where walking in with sides can read as a lack of preparation.

She also points out an upside. Network and studio executives watching from outside the room tend to overscrutinize every audition, and a glimpse of the pages reminds them it’s a work in progress, not a finished performance. Holding the sides honestly is not the same thing as being unprepared.

For self-tapes on union film and TV projects, the rule is written down. SAG-AFTRA’s 2023 agreement says an actor cannot be required to memorize sides for a self-tape, and sides must arrive at least 48 hours before it’s due. Not required isn’t the same as preferred, though, so the plan below still gets you as close to off-book as one night allows. If you want an app to read with you tonight, our round-up of the best apps for TV and film auditions compares them.

What casting does want is a clear take on the scene, a real connection with the reader, and the ability to change when they give you a note. Matthew Lessall, a former president of the Casting Society of America, told Liroff he casts the actor who connects emotionally to the text, and that taking a note in the room and changing is the mark of a gifted actor. A redirect isn’t a bad sign. Often it’s a test of whether you can take direction.

If you can’t tell what this particular office expects, ask. Spotlight’s guide to audition sides suggests checking with your agent whether the casting director prefers you off-book. A one-line email tonight beats a guess.

Triage first: twenty minutes to decide what matters

Before you learn a word, find out what you’re facing. Read the sides twice straight through, once for the story and once for your character. Then answer these on paper.

• What kind of audition is it? In the room, on Zoom, or a self-tape. Each one changes what holding sides looks like.
• Is it a first read or a callback? At a callback they’ve already seen you, so check whether a note came with the request. Our guide on how to prepare for a callback covers what changes.
• How many pages are mostly yours? A page of quick back-and-forth is a different night than a page-long speech.
• Is there more material? Read the character breakdown. If there’s a full script, skim it for who this person is, but tonight your sides come first.

If you have more than one audition tomorrow, Lessall’s advice is to choose the one that matters most to you artistically, financially, or emotionally, learn those pages properly, and do your best on the rest. Memorizing every page for every appointment overnight isn’t realistic, and trying usually leaves you with nothing solid.

Then rank what to learn, because you won’t learn everything equally well. A sensible order is your first line (so you start the scene looking up), the cues that trigger each of your lines, any long speech, and your last line. Short reactive lines, like a single “What?”, usually come on their own once you know the scene.

Spend the first hour on the scene, not the words

This feels backward when you’re panicking about lines, but it’s how experienced actors learn fast. Cognitive psychologist Helga Noice and her husband Tony Noice, a researcher and actor, spent nearly two decades studying how professional actors learn roles. As the APS Observer reports, actors rarely memorize word by word. They break a script into beats, the logically connected intentions that carry one moment into the next, and the words come along with the meaning.

So spend the hour on three questions, and write the answers in the margin.

1. Who are you talking to, and what do you want from them in this scene?
2. Where does the scene turn? Mark each beat, the line where your tactic changes because what you were doing stopped working.
3. What are you doing on each beat? Use a verb you could play: warn, charm, corner, apologize.

Then paraphrase the scene out loud in your own words, beat by beat. If you go up tomorrow, the thought will still be there even when the exact words aren’t, and the words usually follow the thought.

One warning from Jessica Hartley, who leads the MA/MFA in Actor Training and Coaching at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. She tells actors to learn their lines well, but “don’t learn intonation or rhythm, don’t set them.” A reading you lock in at midnight is a reading you can’t change at eleven when the director gives you a note.

Then learn the lines by testing, not rereading

Now the words. The single most useful rule: if you can see the line while you say it, you aren’t learning it. Cover your line, say it out loud from the cue, then check. Getting it wrong and correcting it is the learning, not a sign it isn’t working.

This matters even more for an audition, because auditions are stressful. In a 2016 study in Science, Tufts University researchers had 120 students learn words and pictures, either by restudying them or by taking practice tests. A day later, half of each group went through a standard stress test: an unprepared speech and math problems in front of judges and a video camera. Stress lowered recall in the restudy group, but not in the group that had tested themselves.

A speech in front of strangers and a camera is close to what you’ll face at eleven. That’s the case for spending tonight saying the lines from memory and sometimes failing, rather than reading them a twelfth time.

Specific drills for a one-night learn are in our guide on how to memorize lines in one day, so we won’t repeat them here. If you want first-letter cues fast, paste your lines into the first-letter line memorizer and practice from the letters.

Before you stop, run the scene with another person at least once, even over the phone. Liroff says she can tell immediately when an actor has never rehearsed a scene with another human, because a natural conversational rhythm only comes from practicing with someone. Reading to yourself in the mirror, she adds, doesn’t count. Email the sides to a friend and ask for ten minutes.

Set a stop time and go to sleep

Pick a hard stop that still leaves you a full night before the alarm, and keep it. This isn’t self-care advice. It’s part of the memorization plan.

In a study published in Psychological Science, Stephanie Mazza and colleagues at the University of Lyon had 40 adults learn 16 word pairs, then relearn them twelve hours later. One group learned in the evening and slept before relearning; the other learned in the morning and relearned that evening. The sleep group needed about 3 tries to relearn all 16 words, while the wake group needed about 6. A week later, the sleep group recalled about 15 pairs and the wake group about 11.

That’s tonight’s plan in miniature: learn in the evening, sleep, relearn in the morning. The morning session goes faster because you slept between the two.

Staying up costs you on the other end as well. The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute notes that people short on sleep take longer to finish tasks, react more slowly, and make more mistakes, and can have trouble controlling their emotions. In an audition, that’s the difference between taking a note calmly and freezing on it.

If nerves keep you awake, rest in the dark anyway and leave the script in the other room. And if audition nerves regularly feel like more than nerves, talk to a doctor or a counselor. That help is worth more than any line trick.

The morning: relearn first, then play

When you wake up, test before you read. Go through the scene from the cues with your lines covered and notice what’s still there. Most of it will be. Fix the gaps, then run the scene twice for the beats you chose last night, not just for the words.

Then stop memorizing. Warm up your voice and body the way you would before any performance. In the last half hour before you leave, run only your first line and the beat changes. Plan to arrive with time to spare, so you don’t walk in out of breath. If the appointment asks for a headshot and résumé, print them the night before; an acting resume builder can lay out a one-page résumé in a few minutes. Our 15-minute actor warm-up includes a quiet version for the waiting room.

If it’s a self-tape, the same rule applies: tape once the scene feels like yours, not the minute you wake up. Casting director Caroline Liem suggests that if you need your sides, you unstaple them and post them near the camera, so a glance reads as thought rather than searching, and never show the pages on screen. The rest of the setup, from eyeline to sound, is in our guide on how to self-tape alone. If you want the text on a screen beside the lens instead, see our teleprompter app comparison.

In the room: how to hold your sides well

If the words aren’t fully there, holding the sides is a choice, not a failure. Make it on purpose.

• Hold the pages where you can glance down without dropping your whole head, and turn them along with the scene, as Liroff suggests, so you’re never hunting for your place.
• Take your next line with a glance at the end of the reader’s line or at a natural pause. Then look up and say it to the reader. Never deliver a line into the page.
• Keep listening while the reader speaks. Your reactions are what casting is watching for, and they happen while you’re not talking.
• If you lose your place, look down, find it, and keep going without comment.

If a take really goes off the rails, Liroff’s advice is to stop, say “I’m going to start over,” and do it, with no excuses and no apologies. What she asks actors not to do is the opposite: finish a strong read and then tell the room it was terrible. As she puts it, “Stop talking us out of liking your performance.”

And don’t open with an excuse. “I only got this last night” doesn’t help, because, as you know by now, so did everyone else.

The overnight plan at a glance

Running lines when nobody’s awake

The hard part of a night like this is that cue drills need someone to give you the cues, and at midnight or 6 a.m. nobody’s around. The free fixes work: record the other character’s lines as a voice memo with gaps for yours, or find the friend who’s always up late.

Offbook is the quickest way to do this tonight. Upload the sides and pick your role; realistic voices read the other characters, and it listens through your microphone and plays the next cue when you finish your line. You can hide your own lines while everyone else’s stay visible, which is the cover-and-test drill without the sheet of paper. Rehearse on your laptop with the full script on a big screen, and listen to your scenes on your phone anywhere.

Whatever you use, the plan is the same: scene first, test instead of rereading, sleep, relearn. When you next get more than one night, the approach in how to memorize lines quickly spreads the same steps over days. Tonight, close the script at your stop time. You’ll know more in the morning than you do now.