ABSTRACT
As I have mentioned, agents are not the be all and end all of an actor’s career and you should always be proactive in your own career and explore suitable work opportunities whether you have an agent or not. There are advantages to having one though. A good agent can be an excellent help in guiding your career and procuring auditions on your behalf, as it is their job to have an ear firmly pressed to the ground, hearing about many projects of which you will be totally unaware until they are released in the cinema, transmitted on television or had their opening night. An agent should, hopefully, also have enough personal contacts, respect and influence to receive breakdowns that are not in the public domain and then either remind those responsible for casting of your existence or persuade them of your suitability and get you through the door to meet the work-givers. This will be achieved by building good relationships and rapport with the casting directors, resulting in trust in their judgement and taste in actors, which might take years to gain, or may never happen at all. However, since the deregulation of the closed shop, anyone can set up as an agent and represent artists, and I am afraid to say that a great many do, with minimal knowledge, few contacts and little previous experience. You could even do so yourself, with whatever skill you have – though please don’t, as it really is not as easy as it sounds. The best agents are those who trained with another agent as an assistant and have therefore amassed the experience to sell
their clients and effectively negotiate deals on their behalf. Those agents who are members of the Personal Managers’ Association (www.thepma.com) are all experienced – one prerequisite of joining is trading for at least three years – but, as with the Casting Directors’ Guild, membership is not obligatory, and many good and wellestablished agents do not belong. There is now a vast list of agents spread over sixty-odd pages in Contacts and, worryingly, in twenty years of casting, I have still to receive any form of communication from a fair percentage of them.
