Questions to Ask Actresses

The questions

Open any question to see why it works.

1. 1

   How did you get this part?

   Casting stories are concrete, and they are almost always better than the answer to what drew you to the role. You find out whether it was an offer, a self-tape, a chemistry read, or two years of quietly asking, and each of those opens a different follow-up.

2. 2

   What was the audition actually like?

   Actresses remember auditions in physical detail: the room, who was reading opposite, what they wore, what went wrong. Asking for the scene rather than the feeling gets you specifics instead of a sentence they have already said eleven times this week.

3. 3

   What did you have to learn in order to play her?

   Accents, horse riding, a surgical procedure, how to hold a cigarette in 1962. Skills are easy to describe and hard to fake, and the answer usually contains a detail you could not have prepared a question about.

4. 4

   What is true about being on that set that an audience would never guess?

   This invites a physical detail rather than a theme, and physical details are what people remember from an interview. The cold, the waiting, the fake rain that tastes of chlorine, the actor who was not actually there for the reverse shot.

5. 5

   Which scene was hardest to shoot, and was it hard for the reason I would expect?

   The second half of the question is where the answer lives. The difficult scene is rarely the emotional one, it is the one shot over three nights in February with a crane that kept failing, and asking this way gives permission to say so.

6. 6

   What did you and the director disagree about?

   This is how you find out how the performance was built rather than how it was received. Anyone who says nothing at all either had no input or is protecting a working relationship, and both of those tell you something worth knowing.

7. 7

   How much of her was on the page, and how much did you decide?

   Most performances contain choices no writer wrote, and actresses are rarely invited to claim them. Answers here often include a specific gesture or a piece of backstory that never appears on screen but drove everything that does.

8. 8

   What does she believe about herself that is not true?

   This is much closer to how actresses actually think about characters than any request to describe her in three words. It reliably produces something specific, and it works even on someone who has been interviewed all day.

9. 9

   Was there a line you fought to keep, or one you wanted cut?

   Small, answerable, and it almost always opens onto a larger story about the production or the writer. It also flatters nobody, which is why the answers tend to be honest.

10. 10

    What do you do in the ten seconds before a take?

    Everyone has a ritual, from a piece of music to counting something, and almost nobody is asked about it. It is a low-risk question that gets a personal answer, which makes it useful early if the room has not warmed up.

11. 11

    How do you work with a scene partner whose process is nothing like yours?

    Expect a diplomatic answer first. If you leave a gap, you often get a real one about a specific shoot, and even the diplomatic version tells you something about how that set ran.

12. 12

    What is the difference between playing to a camera three feet away and playing to a balcony?

    A craft question that works on anyone who has done both, and one they are rarely bored by. It tends to produce the most technically interesting minute of an interview, because it is about calibration rather than emotion.

13. 13

    Which of your performances do people misremember?

    Audiences misquote lines, merge two films, and credit her with a scene from someone else's. This one reliably gets a laugh, and the laugh is where the rest of the conversation loosens up.

14. 14

    What part did you come close to getting and not get?

    Near misses are the actual shape of a career, and most actresses will answer if you ask warmly rather than as a gotcha. Some will decline, and the graceful move is to move on rather than press.

15. 15

    What has changed about the way you audition since you started?

    Self-tapes, chemistry reads over video, being known enough to be offered work. The answer maps how the industry changed inside one working lifetime, told from the only vantage point where it is visible.

16. 16

    Who did you learn the most from on a set, and what was it?

    This hands the credit somewhere else, which most people enjoy, and it usually produces a story about one specific day rather than a general tribute. Push gently for what was actually said.

17. 17

    What kind of part do you keep getting sent, and what do you wish arrived instead?

    Typecasting is a live and slightly sore subject for most working actresses. Ask it as a career question rather than an invitation to complain, and you get a clear-eyed answer about how the business sorts people.

18. 18

    What do you do between jobs?

    Not working is the default state of the profession, including for people you have heard of. Asking about it plainly treats it as ordinary, which is how it is actually experienced, and the answers are often the most human part of the interview.

19. 19

    What advice were you given early on that you now think is wrong?

    Far better than asking for advice, because everyone has been handed the same three maxims and has privately decided about them. You get a considered answer rather than a recycled one.

20. 20

    If you stopped acting tomorrow, what would you want to be doing in this business?

    Directing, producing, teaching, or getting out entirely. The answers come faster than you expect, because most actresses have thought about this considerably more than they say in public.