The importance of an actor's resume can hardly be overestimated. It is, after all, the very first impression you will make on most auditioners. It rides alongside your head shot and tells the auditioner that you're not just another pretty face, but actually have experience and versatility. It does this in one side of one page, and if it does it well, the auditioners will have positive expectations of you when you arrive to try out.

It is a very good thing for casting directors to think positive thoughts about you before the audition, because in most cases you will have just a minute or two to make a very positive impression on them. Psychologically, that means that most of what they know of you will be comprised of their preconceived ideas about your skillset and versatility, and the audition itself exists only to quickly confirm or deny their initial impressions from looking at you head shot and resume. So the better your acting resume represents you, the better the impressions that you generate, the more you are anticipated in advance of the audition itself, the better your audition will go. Actors feed off of their audience's expectations, and this is doubly true in a high-pressure situation in which there are only a couple of audience members.

In order to generate positive expectations, you want the casting directors to believe that you are right for their part. So the first thing you'll have to understand is what type of part it is and how has it been played in the past, what types of actors or actresses have been cast in the role and how they have shaped the role to fit their own acting styles. Next, you want to know about the other shows that these particular auditioners have worked with. What is their style, and what types of actors do they like to work with? Have they ever cast a role similar to this one? If so, who got the part and how did they shape the part to reflect their own acting style and the director's artistic vision?

Next, you'll simply adapt your acting resume to meet the needs of the internal vision you've been generating. The only thing there is to really manipulate in your acting resume is your selection of roles and skills to be listed on the resume and the order in which they are to be listed. Most actors simply list their roles in chronological order, but this does nothing for you. You want to list them in order of relevance to the current audition.