Where to Look When You Perform a Monologue (in the Room, on Stage, and on Tape)

You walk in, say your name and the piece, take a breath, and start. Three lines in, a question arrives that you never rehearsed: where am I supposed to be looking? At the people behind the table? At the back wall? At the floor, where your last line seems to have gone?

Most actors rehearse a monologue alone in a bedroom, looking at nothing in particular. Then the room changes, a panel appears, and the eyes start wandering. The panel can see it straight away, because your eyes often show what you’re thinking.

The short version: decide who the speech is spoken to, and put that listener somewhere specific. If it’s another character, place them just above the panel’s heads, not on a panel member. If it’s yourself, let your focus come off the listener and turn inward. If it’s the audience, you may take it out to the house, but read the room first. Then move your eyes when the thought changes, not at random, and rehearse those moves the way you rehearse your lines.

Decide who you’re talking to first

Eyeline is not a separate skill from acting the speech. It is the speech made visible. Joe Richardson, an audition panelist at Guildford School of Acting, puts it simply in Spotlight’s monologue tips: a speaker is always addressing someone, whether that’s themselves, the audience, another character, or a god, and you need to be clear which.

So before you think about where to look, read the speech and answer one question for every few lines: who is this for? Many audition monologues are spoken to one other person. Some turn from that person to themselves and back. A few go out to the audience. Shakespeare’s characters sometimes speak to things that cannot answer at all, such as Time, the night, or a disguise.

Write the answer in the margin. A one-word note per thought is enough: her, me, them, Time. That margin is your eyeline map, and everything else in this guide is just putting it into the room.

If you are still choosing a piece, this is worth thinking about early. Actor Rosalind Eleazar, in her advice for Spotlight Prize nominees, says speeches spoken to someone else tend to work well, because the audience feels like they are that other person and part of the scene. Our guide to choosing contrasting monologues covers the rest of the choice, and you can browse speeches by play in our monologue library.

Don’t play it to the panel

A common question is whether to look at the people auditioning you. For a monologue with no reader, the usual answer is no. Backstage’s guide on where to look during an audition explains why: the person watching may need to take notes, look through paperwork, or whisper to a colleague. Making them your scene partner puts them on the spot. The same guide says that for a musical theater audition it’s standard to focus directly over the auditor’s head.

Richardson says much the same in the Spotlight piece. Panels are often writing, so a hard stare can make them uncomfortable, and looking just above their eyeline is fine. Pick where the speech goes, a person or a spot on the wall, and keep it consistent.

That gives you a reliable default for the room. Place your imaginary listener just above and behind the panel, roughly where a standing person’s face would be if they were a few feet behind the table. The panel still sees your whole face and both eyes, which is the point. Your listener is close enough to them that you’re playing out, toward the people watching, rather than off to a side wall.

One exception is worth knowing. If you’re reading a scene with a reader, Backstage’s advice is the opposite: look at the reader and connect with them. The reader is your scene partner. A monologue has no reader, so you build the partner yourself.

Give the listener a body, not a dot

“Look at a spot” is where most advice stops, and it’s where many monologues go flat. A dot on the wall doesn’t react. A person does.

So build the listener before you start. Decide how tall they are, how far away they are standing, and what they are doing while you speak. Are they backing away? Arms folded? About to leave? Put their eyes at a specific height above the panel. You’ll find you speak differently to someone who is turning toward the door than to someone sitting still and waiting.

StageMilk’s guide to eyelines makes a related point for camera work: it isn’t enough to know where the spot is, you have to make it feel real to you, through imagination or by putting someone you know in that place. The same works in a room. When you can see the listener’s reaction, your next line becomes an answer to it, and the speech starts to move.

Then let them change. If the speech lands a blow, the listener flinches. If you ask a question, they don’t answer, and that silence is why you go on. This is what listening on stage looks like when the other person is invisible.

Move your eyes when the thought changes

Holding one point for two minutes looks like a stare, and real people don’t talk that way. We look at someone, look away to find a word or a memory, and come back. The trick is to make those moves mean something.

Go back to your eyeline map. Every time the note in the margin changes, your focus changes. Here’s how that plays in a well-known speech, Viola’s ring speech from Twelfth Night. Olivia’s steward, Malvolio, has just caught up with her and thrown down a ring she never gave. Now she is alone:

I left no ring with her: what means this lady?
Fortune forbid my outside have not charm’d her!
She made good view of me; indeed, so much,
That sure methought her eyes had lost her tongue,
For she did speak in starts distractedly.

...

Disguise, I see, thou art a wickedness,
Wherein the pregnant enemy does much.

...

O time! thou must untangle this, not I;
It is too hard a knot for me to untie!

Twelfth Night, Act 2, Scene 2, in the public-domain Standard Ebooks text.

One way to map it, as a starting point rather than the only answer:

• “I left no ring with her” is Viola working it out, so the focus can drop to the ring on the ground where Malvolio threw it, or go inward.
• “She made good view of me” is a memory, so she looks back at where Olivia stood in the earlier scene. That place is a fixed point you choose.
• “Disguise, I see, thou art a wickedness” is spoken to the disguise itself, so it can come down to her own clothes.
• “O time!” goes up and out, to something much bigger than her, and the last line comes back to herself.

Each move is tied to a change of thought, so it reads as thinking, not wandering. Once the moves are rehearsed, they also hold the speech together: each place you look is a reminder of what comes next.

When the speech goes to the audience

Soliloquies raise the question of whether to speak to the house. There’s no single rule. Shakespeare scholar Stanley Wells, quoted in Backstage’s piece on why actors should study soliloquies, describes a soliloquy as a speech by a speaker who is alone, addressed to themselves, to the audience, or a mixture of both.

In a performance, that’s a real choice you make with your director. In an audition, the audience is the panel, so be careful. You can take a direct line out over their heads, or across the empty seats behind them, without making any one person answer you. If the people running the audition ask you to speak straight to them, do it.

Keep your eyes off the floor and the ceiling

Two places pull at nervous actors: the floor, because it feels private, and the ceiling, because that’s where lines seem to be stored. Both cost you. Looking down hides your eyes from the panel. Looking up, unless the character is truly addressing the heavens, reads as searching.

Brief, motivated drops are fine. Viola can look at a ring. A character remembering a moment can glance away to see it. The problem is the long, unmotivated stretch where the eyes leave the listener and never come back.

A lot of that searching is memory, not acting. When a line isn’t quite secure, the eyes go hunting for it, and the panel sees every hunt. So know the words well enough that your attention is free for the listener. In Offbook you can hide your lines and say the speech out loud from memory, or swap your lines for first-letter cues while they’re new, then hide the entire script for a final test. Our guide to memorizing a monologue has the full method, and the free first-letter tool turns your lines into first-letter cues.

Adjust it for a stage and for a self-tape

On stage

In a production, your eyeline is shared with the director and the rest of the cast. If the listener is another actor on stage, you play to them, and the director decides how much you open out to the house. For a speech to someone offstage or imagined, the same ideas apply as in the audition room: fix the person somewhere specific, usually out over the audience, and keep that place the same every night so the lighting and the other actors can rely on it.

On a self-tape

Camera changes the geometry. StageMilk’s eyeline guide says to keep the eyeline as close to the lens as you can without looking straight into it, and plan and rehearse each eyeline like blocking.

On camera, your thought shifts can also be smaller, because the lens picks up a glance that would be lost in a theater.

Our full guide to self-taping a monologue covers placing your target beside the lens, framing, and slates.

Rehearse your eyeline like blocking

StageMilk’s advice to rehearse eyelines the way you rehearse lines and blocking applies far beyond camera work. Eyeline you invent on the day is eyeline that wanders. Here’s a plan for the week before an audition.

1. Mark the speech with your eyeline map: one word per thought for who or what it’s spoken to.
2. Decide where each target lives in a room: the listener above and behind an imagined table, a memory to one side, anything inward closer to you.
3. Stand up and run the speech slowly, moving your eyes only when the note changes.
4. Put a chair where the panel would sit and pin a small note on the wall behind it where your listener’s face would be.
5. Film one run on your phone from the chair. Watch it with the sound off; you’ll see every unplanned glance.
6. Fix the glances that come from memory gaps by drilling those lines, not by forcing your eyes to stay still.
7. On the day, find your spot as soon as you’ve introduced yourself, before your first line.

A good practice run treats the whole speech as an answer to something. In Offbook you can upload the scene the speech comes from, pick your role, and have realistic voices read the lines before it, so your speech starts as an answer to what was just said.

If you’d like to see more on how the room works on the day, from walking in to saying thank you, read our guide to audition room etiquette.

Questions actors ask

Should I look at the casting director during my monologue?

Usually not, unless they ask you to. Backstage’s guide explains that the person watching may be taking notes or looking at paperwork, so a monologue played straight to them can be awkward. Place your listener just above their heads instead. Say your name and the piece to them directly, then find your spot.

Is it OK to close my eyes during a monologue?

Rarely. Your eyes are a big part of how the panel reads your thoughts, and closed eyes shut them out. A brief moment can work if the character is truly turning inward, but keep it short and come back to the listener.

Where do I look if the monologue is to several people?

Give each person their own fixed place, spread across the space above the panel, and move between them when the speech turns from one to another. Keep the places the same every run so the moves stay clear.

What if I lose my spot halfway through?

Come back to your listener on the next thought and carry on. A wandering moment is far less noticeable than stopping. If it happens often in rehearsal, it usually means a line isn’t secure yet, so drill the lines around it.