05.24.07
Cover Letter To An Acting Agent
When sending your bio/resume/photos/showreel to a prospective acting agent, casting director or anyone else, you should always include a cover letter.
It tells them why you’re sending the package and it allows you to sell yourself quickly before the whole lot goes into the trash. You should make it a hard hitting sales letter with the only aim to get them to view your photos/showreel/bio.
Much like a job resume, a cover letter will vary between one acting agent and another. Customise it for the peron you are sending it to.
Here are some ideas when writting a cover letter to an acting agent / casting director.
Address the letter to…
…a specific person within the acting agency.
Don’t write “To whom it may concern.” it’s impersonal and spammy. However, just because you’re addressing it personally don’t go and send a package to every agent in that agency, 1 package per agency should be enough, unless they are huge then maybe 1 package per department. They’ll pass it to the most appropriate person if you meet their selection criteria
Keep it short and to the point
Your personal sales letter (cover letter) should be 20 seconds or less to read. Acting Agents are busy and they don’t have time to read an essay and often they don’t care. Filli t with the benefits you can bring to them, don’t talk about yourself too much.
Recent happenings
You could include a line or two on a work that is in pre or post production as it will be relevant to yoru experience even if it is not released yet.
Contact Info
Iinclude at least your phone number, make that your cell phone or pager and a land line. Also include a fax number if you have one and an easy to read professional looing email address. If you are already somewhat famous I might consider passing on your direct land line as you don’t know who is going to get a hold of it.
Personality
Let your personality shine through in both your Biog and your Cover Letter. You do not have to follow a bland corporate format just because you read somewhere the correct formula for laying this stuff out. That is boring and boring gets the garbage bin rather quickly. Dress it up a little but keep it professional.
Signature
Sign your letter. It’s the professional thing to do. You are offering a business letter make it look like one. Skipping this step will make you look amateur and inattentive. People like to know that you pay attention to detail, do it.
Spelling
Spelling is very important, in this day and age if you cannot hit spellcheck on your wordprocessor it just shows that you are sloppy and you don’t care. So why should they care either. Package -> Garbage bin. Don’t let it happen to you.
Once you run the spellchecker over it re-read it and make sure the grammer is correct and that the spellchecker hasn’t added in any oddities.
Spell names correctly, do not offend the people you are writing too by mispelling their name of the company name.
(I might mispell stuff but it doesn’t matter this is just a website and I have heaps more info to write yet + I don’t have aspellchecker inbuit here)