Forums / General Discussion / Real Age vs Visual Age

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EM (Alpharetta, GA)  over 11 years ago

Hi all!

I'm an actor who looks extremely young for her age. This puts me in a bit of a bind:

1) It's unlikely that anyone will book me via talentsoup for looking my true age -- I get cast as high school/college-age characters on stage and film. However, the search function doesn't know that, so I'm not getting pulled for jobs that I look appropriate for.

2. My webcomp boldly displays my age, so I cannot link to it when applying to acting jobs via email. Folks will judge me for my age and not consider me for "young" roles. I'd love link to it, but not at the expense of not booking. I have to instead link to my atlantaperforms profile, where it doesn't trumpet my old age for the world to see. ;)

Any suggestions? Under normal circumstances, I get around this by putting my age range (16-25) if asked, but I can't put a range up on the webcomp. Changing my birthday year didn't seem like an honest solution, so I was hesitant to go that route.

Thanks!

Emi

Eric (Staff)  over 11 years ago

@Emi. An important question and I appreciate your commentary.
The short answer is, you can list your "visual age" if you'd like. There's no Birthday Police here! Since you have experience with an age sweet spot, use that age vs. your actual age.

Here's the long answer-

* 99.9% of every project casts for age ranges by default. So if the client is in the hunt for what they believe is a 25 year old woman, they'd typically search a 10 year span, 20-30 years old.
* Most talent are horrible judges of their visual age. Not to sound harsh but in years of booking talent, we've found that most people naturally skew their perception to a younger visual age. Of course you've got actual market experience where the clients have booked you for younger roles, so that justifies your position well.
* 18-25 demographic is one of the few where clients are looking for someone that really "reads" that age. For instance, pharma and adult beverage companies use 25+ year olds that look closer to 21 typically. So in that case, they want talent that are chronologically older but read younger.
* Using your visual age vs real age may expose you to more projects where you feel you'd better compete but the risk is you are not being served to projects looking for older ladies that read younger. Like life, there's a tradeoff in your decision.

At the end of the day, we want you get booked. Either from our projects of through you own efforts using your Webcomp as a self-promotion tool. So shape and craft your Webcomp the way you see fit, as the goal is to get you in front of likely "buyers". Great question.

EM (Alpharetta, GA)  over 11 years ago

Thanks so much, Rad! I'll use a "new birthday" (ha!) and see what happens.