How to learn sides for an audition: a routine for film and TV actors

The email lands at six in the evening: four pages of sides, a two-line character breakdown, and a self-tape due by six the day after tomorrow. You have a shift in the morning. Somewhere in those pages is a role you’d love to book, and right now it’s just words on a PDF.

Screen auditions run on short notice and repetition. You might get two or three sets of sides in a week, each with its own tone, its own reader lines, and its own deadline. What you need isn’t a heroic all-nighter. It’s a routine you can run every time an email comes in.

The short version: read the whole script or as much as you can get, learn the reader’s lines as cues along with your own, test yourself instead of rereading, learn the thought rather than a fixed delivery, sleep between sessions, and keep the sides close even when you know them. Here’s how each step works.

Know how much time you actually have

Before you learn a word, check the deadline against the rules. Under SAG-AFTRA’s 2023 TV/Theatrical agreement, self-tape sides are supposed to arrive at least 48 hours before the deadline (72 for minors), first-round self-tapes are capped at eight pages, and you can’t be required to memorize them. Commercial self-tapes work on a shorter clock: the 2022 commercials contract requires sides 24 hours in advance.

Non-union projects aren’t bound by these rules, and sides can arrive the night before. Either way, write the deadline at the top of the first page and work backward: when you’ll learn, when you’ll sleep, when you’ll tape, and when you’ll stop taping.

If you have several auditions in one week, triage. Casting director Matthew Lessall, a former CSA president, told Marci Liroff in Backstage that memorizing 50 pages the night before for four or five castings “makes no sense”. Put your deepest work into the audition that matters most, and ask your agent whether another one can move or become a self-tape.

Read the whole script before you learn a line

It’s tempting to open the sides and start drilling your first speech. Don’t. Casting director Marci Liroff advises reading the entire script for a TV or film role whether you’re coming in for one line or 20, because the sides alone can’t tell you the tone or the language. TV scripts are sometimes still being written during casting, so when there’s no script, ask for a synopsis and what happens just before your scene.

Then read the sides through twice, out loud, without trying to learn anything. Notice where the scene starts. Acting coach Matt Newton points out that screen scenes usually begin in the middle, and “your first line is always a response.” Find what you’re responding to, even if it happened off the page.

Last, write one sentence in the margin: what your character wants from the other person in this scene. Everything you learn next hangs on that sentence.

Learn the reader’s lines as well as your own

On a self-tape, your reader sits beside the camera and feeds you every cue. In a room, it’s a casting associate who may read flat and fast. Either way, the other character’s lines are what you react to, and if you only know your own, you’ll spend the scene waiting for your turn instead of listening.

So learn the scene, not just the part. You don’t need the reader’s lines word for word, but you need to know the last few words of every cue cold, and what each cue asks of you. A useful test: cover your lines, read a cue, and say what your character is answering before you say the line.

Then test yourself instead of rereading. In a 2006 study by Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke, students who practiced recalling a passage remembered about 61 percent of it a week later, compared with 40 percent for students who spent the time rereading, even though the rereaders felt more confident. Cover, say, check beats reading the PDF ten more times, and it takes the same twenty minutes.

In comedy, the exact words are the joke

Paraphrase is risky in any screen audition, since writers expect their text. In comedy it can kill the joke outright. The rhythm and the last word are often what gets the laugh, and a paraphrase that means the same thing can kill it. Here’s a short run from the first scene of Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, a good model for the dry, precise dialogue that turns up in a lot of TV comedy sides:

If you’re reading Lane, the joke in your first line here is “and a pint.” Say “Yes, sir, eight and a bit” and the scene goes flat, even though the meaning is close. The same goes for Algernon’s “I ask merely for information,” a closer that only works in exactly those words.

For lines like these, step away from the page with first letters. Here is Lane’s first line in this excerpt:

Say the full line from the letters, then check it against the sides. Once it comes out right twice in a row, drop the letters. You can turn your own sides into first-letter cues with our free first-letter tool.

Learn the thought, not the tune

The worry with fast memorizing is that you’ll sound memorized: every line delivered with the same rhythm you drilled at the kitchen table. That happens when you learn the sound of the line instead of the reason for it.

Cognitive psychologist Helga Noice and actor-researcher Tony Noice spent years studying how professional actors learn roles. As the APS Observer reported, the actors they studied rarely relied on rote repetition. They worked out what the character wants and why each line is said, and the words came with the meaning. The Noices call this active experiencing.

Coaches say the same about delivery. Jessica Hartley, of Royal Central School’s MA/MFA in Actor Training and Coaching, told Spotlight: “don’t learn intonation or rhythm, don’t set them.” Lock the words and the intention, and let the reading change from take to take. A useful drill is to run the scene three times with three different ways of going after the same want, keeping the words identical.

Sleep is part of the prep

When sides arrive at night, it’s easy to keep drilling until two in the morning. The research points the other way. In a study led by Stephanie Mazza, people who learned material in the evening, slept, and relearned it in the morning needed about half as many attempts to relearn a list of word pairs as people who did both sessions in one day, and they remembered more a week later.

So split your prep into two sessions with a night’s sleep between them. In the evening, read, find the want, and get the lines roughly in. In the morning, even ten minutes before work, test yourself cold before you look at the page. Whatever you miss is your list for the next twenty minutes.

Off book, but keep the sides close

Being off book for a screen audition doesn’t mean hiding the pages. Liroff, who has spent nearly 40 years in casting, says there are no hard and fast rules. In the U.S., she says, most casting directors want you as off book as possible with the sides handy, turning pages with the scene; holding them reminds executives watching later that this is a work in progress. In England and Australia, she notes, actors would never bring sides into the room.

Commercial casting director Ken Lazer draws a line by format: for commercials it looks better not to hold the copy, while for TV and film holding it is fine, and some casting directors want it held because scenes change at the last minute. And actor and audition teacher Michael Kostroff argues that it’s worrying about the lines, not being less than fully memorized, that stiffens a read.

On a self-tape, nobody wants to see you looking down at a page in your lap. Caroline Liem, writing in Backstage, suggests unstapling the sides and posting them near the camera, and she puts the reader about one step from the lens, speaking more quietly than you because they’re closer to the mic.

A sides routine from email to upload

Here’s the whole routine for a self-tape with about two days’ notice. With less time, shorten both sessions but keep a night’s sleep between them. With more, add a second run-through day before taping.

Running the scene when your reader is busy

Every step above is easier with someone reading the other lines, at your pace, as often as you need. Your reader for the tape may only be free for the hour you shoot. Three ways to get cues before then:

• Use Offbook. Upload the sides, pick your role, and AI voices read every other character while Offbook listens to you and plays the next cue when you finish your line. Hide your lines, slow down or speed up the other voices, and set line detection to Strict so it holds you close to the script. Rehearse on your laptop with the sides on a big screen, and listen to the scene on your phone on the way to work.
• Record the reader’s lines yourself on your phone with a gap after each cue. It works, but it takes time to make, and you’ll have to redo it if new pages arrive.
• Run it by phone with a friend for ten minutes the night before. Ask them to read flat and quick, so you get used to driving the scene yourself.

Whichever you use, check the casting notice before you tape: some ask for a live reader rather than recorded or AI-read lines. For the night-before version of this plan, see what to do when your audition is tomorrow, and for setting up the tape itself, how to self-tape alone.

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