How to Create Your Acting Resume
For professional screen actors, the resume is an important part of their toolkit and career. Actors are always looking for the next job, and a clear and well-structured resume, coupled with a current and clear headshot, makes a great first impression.
What to put in your acting resume
The header. The top of the resume should tell the casting director who you are. Start with your professional name. What do you want to be professionally known as? That's the name that should be on your resume. Your contact information, or your agent/manager's contact details if you have representation, should be next. Phone number and email address, make it easy for those hiring you to reach you. If you'll be making your resume public, make a version without your personal phone number.
Then add your physical stats: hair colour, eye colour, height, and build. Adding a profile or summary for your experience at the top of the page is an optional but beneficial step, especially if you've worked on well known productions. Finally, add your union status. If you're in a market that has unions but you aren't in one, simply type "non-union".
Your experience. Add your film, tv, commercial, and theatre credits under separate headings. List the production title, your role, the production company and/or director, and whether your role was for a lead or supporting character. Here's an example:
DESTINY Police Officer (supporting) Grasshopper Productions (dir. Jeremy Whittaker)
Avoid listing amateur roles. It's often better to highlight supporting roles in larger productions than lead roles in smaller productions. Remember, your resume is meant to highlight your professional work. If your goal is to book principal acting roles, don't list extras work on your resume.
Your training. Lead with your post secondary acting education from a university or college, if you have it. Also list training at professional acting school programs and workshops.
Special skills, languages, accents, dialects, and awards. For these, be very specific. List skill levels where applicable, including whether you're fluent in a language or speak it natively. If you sing, put your range. For accents and dialects, put the specific regions.
How to format your acting resume
Keep it clean and simple. Your resume should be on a letter sized page (8.5 by 11 inches), some markets ask for 8 by 10 inches to fit the resume on the back of a headshot of the same size. Use an easy to read serif font. Save your resume as a PDF to avoid errors during printing.
A great tool to use to create a well-formatted resume is Canva, which has easy to edit templates specifically made for acting resumes. If you're not familiar with Canva, this video is for you! It's a step by step tutorial of how you can grab one of those templates, or create a resume from scratch.
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