Choosing a monologue that will book the audition

What casting is really auditioning when they ask for a monologue

When casting asks for a monologue, they are not really asking for a short performance. They are asking three questions at once. Does this actor know what material suits them. Can they hold a scene alone. Do they have any taste. All three questions are being answered by the choice of monologue, before you deliver a single line.

This is the first thing most actors miss. Your monologue choice is evaluated. Casting has sat through thousands of monologues. They know the twenty that every actor does, and they know the ones that signal "this person picked their piece themselves, from something they have actually read." Picking well is half the work.

Freya has seen it go both ways. A middling performance of a well-chosen piece that landed the room. A technically strong performance of a tired piece that did not. Casting is not evaluating the monologue on its own terms. They are evaluating how well the monologue and the actor fit each other.

A lot of standard monologue advice lives on sites like Backstage and in print anthologies. Those are fine as starting points. But most actors find better pieces by reading plays from end to end, not by scanning anthologies of extracted monologues. Play catalogues like Concord Theatricals, Dramatists Play Service, and the Royal Court reading library are worth browsing.

Matching the monologue to your castable range

Your castable range is narrower than you want it to be and specific in ways you may not have fully admitted to yourself. A twenty-six-year-old male actor with soft features and a quiet voice is probably not going to book "Macbeth’s dagger speech," no matter how well he does it. A forty-five-year-old actor with a warm, low voice is probably not going to book a role written for an anxious twenty-something.

Your monologue should sit inside your castable range. Not on its edge. Not outside it. Right in the middle of what you can play convincingly, right now, at this point in your life. A monologue that lands you casting-in-your-own-type is worth more than a monologue that shows you stretching.

How to figure out your castable range honestly: list the five most recent roles you have booked or seriously contended for. Name the qualities the roles shared. That cluster of qualities is your current castable range. Your monologue should come from a play where you could plausibly be cast in a similar part, not from a play where the role is a dream stretch.

This is the hardest advice for young actors to take, because everybody wants to play against type. Save the against-type material for when you have the credits to back it. At the audition stage, casting wants to see you do what you do best, in your sweet spot.

Matching the monologue to the room

The room matters. A monologue for a serious drama school audition is not the same piece as a monologue for a sitcom general. A monologue for a casting director who specialises in prestige streaming drama is not the same piece as a monologue for a theatre director in regional rep.

Before you lock your monologue, know the room. What does the company cast. What kind of work do they make. Who is sitting in the room when you walk in. If you can, look up the casting director. Their credits will tell you the tonal register they cast in. Calibrate your monologue to that register.

If the company does naturalistic contemporary drama, your monologue should be naturalistic contemporary drama. If the company does absurdist comedy, pick absurdist comedy. If you walk into a sitcom general with a Shakespeare monologue, you are announcing that you have not thought about who you are auditioning for. That announcement is usually louder than any individual acting choice in the piece.

The exception is a general audition where the company wants to see range. In that case, pick two contrasting pieces, both within your castable range, calibrated so that together they demonstrate the range the company is likely to cast you in.

Matching the monologue to your strengths

Most actors have two or three acting strengths they know about and one or two they do not. The monologue you pick should show your known strengths, and if possible give you room to show one of the unknown ones.

Known strengths are usually the easier to name. You know if you are good at stillness, at specificity, at a particular kind of humour, at a particular emotional register. Pick a monologue that puts one or two of those front and centre.

The unknown strengths are the ones casting will notice and you will not. A specific way your face shifts on a particular kind of line. A rhythm in your delivery that registers as confidence. Something that lands well with audiences and that you personally consider unremarkable. These are usually revealed through tape review with a coach or a trusted outside eye.

If you are uncertain about your strengths, run three different monologues for a coach and ask them to tell you which one showed the most of what you do well. The answer may surprise you. A piece you did not think was your best showcase may be the one that lands you on an agent’s list. Our audition coaching spends the first session doing exactly this kind of diagnostic when an actor is picking new material.

The monologues to retire (and why)

There is a standard pool of pieces that casting has seen too many times. Most of them were great pieces once. The repetition has emptied them out. Casting hears the first line and groans internally. You have to work twice as hard to overcome the groan, and it is usually not worth it.

The specifics shift by country and decade, but at any given moment there are roughly twenty pieces that are over-represented. Talk to any working casting director and they will give you their current list. In the current Anglophone market, the over-done pieces include the obvious Shakespeare speeches (the Macbeth dagger, the Juliet "wherefore art thou," Portia’s "quality of mercy"), several standard contemporary monologues from the most-anthologised American playwrights of the last forty years, and monologues from plays that were recent hits whose moment has passed.

If you are tempted to bring one of these, the question is whether your take on the piece is genuinely distinct. If it is, you can survive the groan. If it is a competent version of the standard reading, pick something else. The bar for a well-worn piece is higher than the bar for a fresh one.

A practical rule of thumb: if you found the monologue in an anthology that markets itself as "the essential monologues for actors," treat that as a warning signal. Anthologies pre-select the pieces most likely to be over-done. Read whole plays instead. Find your piece in a scene that works for you, cut it carefully, and bring in something casting has probably not heard twice this week. For more on how that cutting and rehearsing then works, see our cluster piece on building a two-minute monologue.