Can you be an actor in a small town? The answer is yes. There are essentially three ways for you to do this.
This is something you do for fun or as a way to express yourself. It’s not something you see being your career.
Your goal is to build your foundation by focusing on getting experience and take classes. It’s a stepping stone before having to move to a place that has more opportunities.
You have an agent that works in a larger market city, and you would audition via self-tape.
Let’s take a look at each of these a bit more in-depth.
Hobby Acting
Many small towns have a civic center or community theatre that will put on productions a few times a year. A lot of times, these productions may not need people with extensive acting experience but rather, people who want to act and are looking for an outlet to express themselves.
I lived in a small town for a few years when I had a sales job. This cozy little town had two theatres; one was a dinner theatre, the other was a community playhouse. Both of these would post auditions on local message boards and at the local library. Nowadays, while I’m sure you can still find auditions in both of those places, they are also likely accessible on social media. The great thing about these productions is that anyone could audition and hod the opportunity to be cast. Both of these acting programs also offered classes as part of their operations.
I was living in that small town before I really started to pursue my acting career. I took classes at both of these places and eventually found a third acting teacher who taught classes in their house. However, that was pretty much as far as it could go. There were casual actors in the city who basically did the plays every year and had been doing so for 20, 30 or 40 years, and that was enough for them. That’s where they got their satisfaction from, and that’s where they managed to explore their creative urges. It also wasn’t as stressful and judgmental as the professional acting world, so for some actors, it’s the perfect fit.
When I talk about this style of acting I’m always reminded of the film Waiting For Guffman.
As The First Step in Your Acting Career
I touched on this in the first section, but a lot of small towns can help you to understand acting at an elementary to intermediate level through acting classes and local productions. It’s usually quite cheap, maybe a couple of hundred bucks for 4-5 classes. Plus, you can audition freely for local productions without an agent. Small local theatre can be a lot of fun. It’s a great place to build that initial community, and it allows you to practice what you’ve learned in your classes and explore yourself artistically.
It would be wise to set some time aside and google your local theatre communities, and local acting classes and see what opportunities they are currently offering. If there is a college or university with media programs near you, it may also be worth looking into if they need actors for student projects, this is just another way to gain experience.
Once you move to a major city, an acting class can be anywhere between $500 to $1,000 for a month of training. You’ll still see a lot of acting opportunities that don’t require an agent, but there will be some that do. Building a foundation in your small town will ideally make the transition to a larger city a little less overwhelming, and hopefully, a little easier to navigate.
Self-Taping With an Agent
This is technically an option, but it’s so unrealistic and rare that I honestly hesitated to write about it.
Here’s why:
If it’s a small part, then it’s not really in any casting directors’ interest to cast someone who lives far away. They’re taking a risk, and logistically it’s harder.
If the audition is for a larger role, they may be more willing to entertain actors who are not close to where the production is filming. It’s important to note that after a self-tape, they’ll still want to see you in person, which means you will travel in for a callback. This is where it gets tricky because, for larger roles, you often need to be at least somewhat of an established actor. So it’s almost a catch-22 situation, and again, so rare that it’s unrealistic for most of us.
Alternatively, suppose you live not so much in a small town but on the outskirts of a large city. Instead of being 10 hours away, you can make it to the city in under three.
How does it work then?
Well, then you would likely have an agent who would simply consider you as being in town. The expectation would be that rather than self-tapes, you go in person for your auditions. You would have to be okay with potentially travelling into the city every couple of days for a five-minute audition. While this works great for some, it can be tedious for others.
To summarize, from a casting director or agent’s point of view, living in the suburbs, or a close surrounding city is just like living in town. It’s you who will have to be okay with travelling back and forth.
So that’s the three ways you can have acting in your life if you live in a small town. Now, the next thing you have to ask yourself is which one of these actors do you want to be.
