March 8, 2000
Tough audition. The character of SCOTTY doesn't have any real scenes in the pilot script. So they had put together sides for the audition. There was a scene and a monologue.
The scene was very hard to do, probably one of the hardest things to make good in a long time. Not that the writing was bad, just the selection of lines and conversations. On the first page, on which there are 15-30 type-written lines, SCOTTY has 2. The same for the next page. It was just hard to get a rhythm going when the casting director had to jump all over the page to keep it interesting. So that didn't feel so great.
Then I got to the monologue and I did something I almost never do. I
screwed up. (OK, that's not the unusual occurrence because it's not
all that unusual.) What was unusual, though, was that I stopped and
started over. It happened on the very first line so I thought if I
just catch this now I won't be thinking about it the rest of the
monologue. So I stopped. Felt good. And when I restarted I think it
went well. Good monologue. Whenever I advise someone on auditioning,
I generally say that it's best to stop if something is not going well
and start over. That's the theory. In practice, I just can't get
myself to stop. I push onward, sometimes mangling the words beyond
recognition as I just try to keep the car moving forward. Just don't
stop. Don't stop. I'm glad my head didn't listen to that advice
today. I gave myself a shot at it.