Tavi Gevinson: Auditions Are Work. Pay Us. (Guest Essay)

Tavi Gevinson
·14 min read

It is both obvious and radical to say that auditions are work. Actors are even supposed to be paid for them. SAG-AFTRA’s contract with the studios states that we’re entitled to half our scale day rate for every audition we perform but don’t book for a TV show, studio feature or high-budget indie. Since our day rate is $1,082, that’s $541.

Tavi Gevinson
Tavi Gevinson

How can a legal right feel so risky to talk about, even for people who agree that this payment is fair? When I first learned about audition pay last fall, from a video by Sarah Ramos, an emergency response team of arguments rushed through my head: Auditions are job interviews. Casting directors will hate it. Producers can’t afford it. I’m just lucky to be following my dreams. That is, I viewed it from several perspectives except for that of a unionized laborer. I learned that my work was already worth more than I thought it was, that I could’ve made a thousand dollars that week alone, and my response was, “I’m good!”

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But the next time I spent hours making a self-tape, it seemed absurd that this commissioned performance should cost Netflix the same as a link to my reel. I had recently watched actors’ tapes with a screenwriter friend and was amazed by the countless, detailed artistic decisions of each performer. They saved my imagination a lot of work. Perhaps they would all, like me, say they were just lucky to be there. That didn’t take away from the obvious value they created for the production. I realized how little I knew about auditions’ value as not simply “opportunities” for us, but commodities that studios need.

That’s why, since January, I’ve met regularly with other SAG-AFTRA members to form a group called Auditions Are Work. Talking with performers and casting professionals, studying our contracts over time, and learning how auditions have evolved has given me context for several challenges performers face today. As the union heads into negotiations with the studios June 7, many actors understand the importance of equipping them with a Strike Authorization Vote to help win greater residuals, employer contributions to health and pension plans and AI protections. It also strengthens our position to be aware of untapped revenue sources that are already in our contract, that we don’t have to negotiate for. The studios have agreed to audition pay every three years since 1947, and paid claims when performers have filed them. We are sitting on a highly valuable provision. If fully enforced, it would strengthen our health and pension plans and enable more members to qualify for them. I also want actors to know about it because the studios may seek to remove it — I’ll get to that — and it would be a mistake to lose it without serious, union-wide discussion. Unlike the wages that pertain only to on-set jobs, audition pay applies to our workforce’s most frequent service.

Since audition pay has become a topic of debate outside our union, some industry professionals publicly dismiss it without perhaps understanding that they’re implicitly undermining our contract and endorsing corporations paying freelancers below their minimum rates. It’s as though the studios are so obviously terrible that their basic legal responsibilities seem irrelevant, or maybe acting is such a rarefied profession that people who do it don’t seem to need protections.

These misconceptions are partly why I did not pay attention to my own union or contracts for so long, thinking that as long as I was making a living, it would be silly, even entitled, to care about actors’ wages. I wrongly conflated my own good fortune with our whole workforce, and was late to notice that the type of stability I was trying for doesn’t even exist anymore. You can now be both a successful working actor, landing covetable jobs, and a struggling actor, earning less than the health care threshold, receiving wimpy residuals for shows that made the streamers rich. Only 12.7 percent of our membership currently makes the annual $26,470 needed to qualify for union health insurance. In 2020, thousands of our members were kicked off the health plan, including 8,200 seniors who’d been paying for lifetime coverage and had decades of credits. It is possible to give an Oscar-winning performance in a best picture winner that broke A24’s records and not qualify for health care the following year. We take up space onscreen, but we don’t share fairly in the profits of a $660 billion industry. While Hollywood celebrates individuals’ work to promote its shows and movies, our workforce’s labor is largely misrepresented. Most actors are not Oscar winners, and most Oscar winners have spent most of their careers auditioning.

This dissonance makes it all the more urgent for actors to speak openly on the reality of our profession and the value of all that we contribute to productions. I want to share what I’ve learned after months of such conversations, and to make it easier to say that auditions are work.

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Simply put, auditions require labor. They typically entail reading the script, memorizing the sides, crafting a character and rehearsing a performance — all before the audition itself. In any fairly paid job, time spent working for one employer is understood as time you can’t spend on another. And while $541 might seem like a shocking price for an audition, it’s half our day rate. I’ve definitely put more labor into certain auditions than I have some days on set.

Self-tapes have also offloaded technical labor and production costs onto actors. A recent report estimated that requiring performers to provide readers has saved producers $250 million annually. That’s not including our space, equipment and software, and the added time. To think I ever wondered how they could afford to pay us!

Whether self-taped or in person, auditions make it possible for producers to assemble casts from a place of knowledge, not speculation. They get to experience their material interpreted by professionals and to further develop it. A character is created when a skilled actor brings the words off the page.

More crudely, producers can use auditions as bargaining chips against an offer, or as instant backups. If producers now require casting directors to commission 100-500 tapes per role — per one casting director, the new “industry standard,” and more than she can watch in full — I imagine it’s because having a range of auditions is valuable. Some actors I know have gone on auditions only to discover they’re the only nonwhite actor in the waiting room. When white actors booked the roles, these actors suspected they may have been tokenized in the audition process by producers who were not serious about inclusivity. Another friend recently did an extensive audition process for a part that went to the famous producer’s famous relative. Auditions perform many functions for studios, and we are expected to do them without knowing if our chances at the role are 1-in-30 or 1-in-500.

Auditions are not job interviews. They’re unique work samples commissioned by producers that we can’t reuse for other jobs. I don’t know of any profession where workers go on job interviews at the rate that working actors audition, in such large candidate pools, for jobs that can be as brief as one day, and which rarely in themselves come with benefits.

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SAG’s founders included pay for camera tests in our first contract, in 1937. Ten years later, it was updated to include audition pay: “if the player is not given employment in the picture, the player shall receive one-half (½) day of pay.” Far from a studio-era oddity, it is one of many protections from that time that our contract includes to this day: pay for overtime, travel time — the list goes on.

Some point out that there were fewer actors back in 1947, that the industry has changed. Correct: It is more profitable than ever. It includes TV and streaming. It’s owned by tech corporations, media conglomerates and private equity firms. All this time, the union and producers have agreed to keep audition pay in the contract, and all this time, auditions have become more work, and saved producers more money.

Last September, SAG-AFTRA responded to members’ interest in audition pay by issuing a statement saying it would only pursue members’ claims if you are kept waiting over an hour for the audition to start, if you perform a camera test, or if you are expressly required to memorize lines. In the contract, wait time and camera tests are paid separate from audition pay, and there is no language about memorization requirements. Since then, actors have received audition requests that say we aren’t required to memorize, indicating that producers may seek to remove audition pay from the contract this month.

The statement limited our ability to collect owed wages, and was made by the non-elected negotiating committee that the union’s former president appointed in 2019. By rescinding it and protecting the provision, the union’s current leaders can be the ones to make audition pay a reality, strengthen performers’ earnings and restore dignity to our work.

Along with memorization disclaimers, actors have recently noticed more requirements presented as “self-tape tips.” I received one request that said “YOU DO NOT NEED TO SPEND ANY MONEY TO SELF-TAPE,” and turned mine in only to learn that the role had been offered to and accepted by another performer, days earlier. My time and money had already been wasted. Others, from friends: Be familiar with the lines, but don’t feel like you have to memorize. Don’t memorize, but do learn the ASL translation and sign it as you speak. You don’t need an expensive backdrop, just a nice wall, but if you don’t have one, please buy blue bedsheets.

It is painful to see casting directors caught between producers’ demands and actors’ exploitation. If you find yourself trying to limit the amount of work an actor puts into an audition, perhaps the work we’re doing is undeniable.

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My group has spent a lot of time exploring actors’ concerns about how audition pay would limit the volume of auditions, particularly for performers with fewer credits, and those underrepresented onscreen — people of color, queer people, gender-nonconforming people and people with disabilities.

It is first important to acknowledge that the current model is not some equalizer. Producers can commission any number of auditions when an offer is already out and give favor to some actors for any reason. The new scale and frequency of self-tapes means that more actors are doing more work for diminished chances at each role. Many are not in a position to turn down an audition nor to turn in anything less than competitive work. They need the job, and to maintain good relationships with their reps, casting and producers. I am not sure this model can be considered financially accessible if it requires performers to keep multiple side jobs or rely on other sources of income. Nor is it respectful of actors’ time and resources to expect them to churn out free work without even knowing what their odds are.

As for concerns about representation, shows and movies need diversity to succeed. Casts have become increasingly inclusive in recent years, and the Academy now issues requirements for racial and ethnic diversity for any movie that seeks a best picture nomination. Audition pay would force producers to be more intentional about these commitments. It would disincentivize them from feigning attempts at inclusivity by commissioning free auditions from actors they’re not seriously considering. They can’t claim to protect underrepresented groups by soliciting their endless unpaid work when they’re actually supposed to be paying them. Some producers even use inclusivity as a bargaining chip against audition pay — Well then we won’t see the people who need roles the most! — pitting fair representation against fair pay. It is disingenuous to act like inclusive casting is a boon for the performers alone, or like producers don’t already have the power to make their casting processes more equitable. Actors talking about audition pay — our owed wages — are not the ones creating this scarcity. If producers want to see a range of people, they can conduct cold reads or general meetings for free. But if they want auditions, they have to pay.

We ultimately cannot force producers to fairly review our work. We can get fair pay for our work. Audition pay will make each audition a paid job and real opportunity. It will take care of more actors financially, not just the one who books the role. It will count toward your health coverage, pension credits and unemployment benefits. Commissions for auditions would give reps an even greater incentive to secure them, and be particularly meaningful for smaller-sized companies. As for concerns that producers will just go nonunion, any production using the TV/Theatrical contract would have to pay every auditioning actor.

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Talking about audition pay once countered all my instincts around how to present myself as an actor: to lead with my credits, not complain, and endear myself to anyone who could hire me. Now I find the topic liberating. I have been working since I was a kid: writing for magazines since I was 13, acting professionally since I was 16. Many of my opportunities felt like dreams come true. They were also work. My enthusiasm didn’t preclude corporations’ ability to profit off them, even if their friendly employees paid me only in free clothes and a camera (ad content for Target) or travel and hotel (hosting episodes of a TV show). It’s a huge relief to be able to view these experiences through a framework of labor, free of my psychological gymnastics about my individual luck. I’m grateful to know more about my protections as a SAG-AFTRA member, and that it’s a democratic organization I can participate in, rather than constantly negotiating with myself around doing free work or having artistic outlets.

The last months have taught me that when your work is devalued, you may develop an emotional investment in its further devaluation, because to confront how much you’re really owed would be devastating. You might even devalue other people’s work, in the spirit of, “We’re all just doing what we love.” Friends who started acting when they were even younger than me have found the revelation of audition pay particularly dizzying. It makes the virtual cattle-call model even more irresponsible. The lore of Marvel getting 7,000 free tapes from kids in their search for one star becomes an ethical failure.

Talking about your owed wages should not put your career at risk. The very fact that some actors have this fear confirms that auditions have been wrongly characterized as opportunities we should just be grateful for. But if the fear is alienating people whose jobs are easier when they can commission as many free auditions as possible, that only confirms that auditions are highly valuable. It does not behoove us to devalue wages we already have the right to, to send a message that we’re happy for studios to not enforce our contract, or to randomly offer up anything less than what we already have. That’s just bad negotiating — as individuals, and as a union.

Performers have been led to believe that we’re powerless, but we have what studios need. We are also skilled at all the things that make powerful advocates: storytelling, collaborating, resilience. Our union has 170,000 members — those who can speak to auditioning with several side jobs, and those who have already revealed that even if you’re number one on a call sheet, you can be subject to discrimination and abuse. We regularly face rejection, critics, cameras and crowds. We’re able to bare our souls under intense pressure, with people we just met, in front of perfect strangers. Talking about the reality of our profession can feel embarrassing, but our vulnerability is our greatest strength. And we could not wish for a more supportive time, thanks to the environment created by Crew Stories and IATSE Stories, and the writers currently on strike. We don’t need producers’ cooperation, but to rally each other, and empower our negotiating committee. We can’t afford anything less. Nor, frankly, can everyone who relies on our work. You can’t have an entertainment industry without entertainers.

Tavi Gevinson is an actor and a writer. She recently worked on HBO Max’s Gossip Girl and Off-Broadway in Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s Assassins. She has written for such publications as the New Yorker and New York magazine and was the editor of Rookie magazine.

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