Two résumés, one career
Both documents belong to the same invented actor. Nothing has been added and nothing has been taken away. Only the decisions are different.
We invented him on purpose. An example built from a real actor’s career teaches you their career, not the document — you end up copying the credits instead of the choices. So Jordan Reyes does not exist, and everything on his page is ordinary.
Why one variable at a time is the only way to learn this.
Put a good résumé next to a bad one from a different actor and you cannot tell what you are looking at. You will read the better career as the better document.
Hold the career still and the formatting becomes visible. Every difference between these two pages is a decision somebody made, and each one can be named.
That is also why the bad version is not a joke. It is what an intelligent person produces on their first attempt.
The fourteen errors, named
Not ranked by how ugly they are. Ranked by what they actually cost you, which is a different order.
The decisionWhat it costs
Extra work upgradedCalled “featured”
Worst
The only credit type that cannot be supported by any record. See below — it is the single most damaging line on the page.
Brand names listedUnder commercials
Severe
Every named brand is a conflict, and a conflict expires while the line does not. You get crossed off for a restriction that lapsed.
Skill level inflated“Fluent French”
Severe
The cheapest lie in the industry to catch. They will speak French to you, in the room, immediately, because it costs them nothing to try.
Character names for screen“Marcus”
Costly
Nobody knows who Marcus is. The reader cannot tell whether you carried the film or had one line, so they assume the smaller thing.
Full home addressTop of the page
Costly
This is a safety point, not a formatting one. It gets stapled to a photograph of your face and handed to strangers in rooms you were invited into, then photocopied and left on tables.
Dates beside creditsA play marked 2015
Costly
Not clutter. A leak. A run of dated credits reconstructs your age on a document that never states it, and casting is permitted to act on age.
Birth year in the emailThe address itself
Costly
The same leak by another route, and the one nobody notices. You removed your age from the page and left it in the contact line.
Two pagesInstead of one
Real
The second page is frequently not printed, and when it is, it is not stapled to anything. It is the page your best credit is on surprisingly often.
Objective statementA paragraph at the top
Real
It appears in no acting source we could find anywhere. It is a job-application instinct applied to a document that is not a job application.
References line“Available upon request”
Real
Same category of error. Your references are already on the page, in the director column, and the reader may well know them.
School work mixed inAmong professional credits
Real
Not shameful and not equivalent. Mixed in, it drags the professional credits down to its level rather than lifting itself up.
Union status unclearOr absent
Real
A practical fact somebody needs before they can hire you. Leaving it out creates an email rather than a booking.
Skills too vague“Sports, accents”
Minor
A skills list exists to be searched. Nobody is casting for “sports.” Name the sport, name the accent, or take it off.
Decorative typographyA display font
Minor
The least important thing on this list, and the one people fix first. It costs you almost nothing and it is not why you are not being called.
Notice which end of that table is cheap to fix. Almost everybody who redesigns their résumé starts with the font, because it is the only item on the list that is visible from across a room. It is also the one that changes nothing. The four decisions at the top are all invisible to a casual glance and all of them are load-bearing. If you do only one thing from this page, do the first four and leave the font alone.
The worst line is the one with the most famous word in it
On the bad version there is a Marvel credit, and background work has been written up as “featured.” It is the line beginners want most and the one that does the most harm.
The reason it is so tempting is not complicated. It has the most famous word on the page in it. Everything around it is a fringe theatre and a short film, and there, in the middle, is a name everybody has heard of.
The plain version
Bonnie Gillespie, in Self-Management for Actors and on her own site: “Calling extra work ‘featured’ on a resume is telling a lie.” We should say that this is from 2008 rather than last week, because it is quoted everywhere as though it were current.
Why this credit specifically
Background work is uncredited by definition. So there is no record that could support the claim and every record that could contradict it — and on a production that size, the room full of people who remember who was there is enormous and heavily documented.
And then there is the gate
Spotlight’s own joining criteria, current: for the experience route “we do not accept extra/supporting artist work, unpaid work, stunt work, body double work or credits where productions where part of your training.”
The distinction worth taking awayThe first two are advice. The third is a gate. You can disagree with a casting director about what belongs on a résumé. You cannot disagree with a platform about what counts towards membership, because it is not a conversation.
A conflict expires. The résumé line does not.
This is the strongest argument on the page and it used to be made without a number. Now it has one, and the number is not the one everybody quotes.
When you shoot an advert you are held exclusive to that product category. You cannot do a competing one. That restriction is what a casting office is worried about when it sees a brand on your résumé, and it has an expiry date.
The stageWhat actually happens, under the current American contract
It attachesOn the shoot day
Union
The session fee counts as the first holding fee. You are held from the first day of production, whether or not the advert ever airs.
The cycleThirteen weeks
Union
Holding fees fall due every thirteen weeks from the session date. Miss one and the exclusivity ends.
The maximumTwenty-four months
Changed
Twenty-one is the figure every article gives. It was raised to twenty-four in the 2025 contract, effective April 2025, and the same figure now covers animated commercials too.
Digital-only spotsThe modern case
Weaker
A commercial made for digital use only can carry no automatic exclusivity and no automatic holding fees at all unless separately negotiated. A lot of current work sits here.
Non-union workAnything goes
Unknown
Purely contractual, with no cap forcing anybody back to the table. It can be longer, vaguer, or perpetual if it is drafted that way. Nobody publishes typical terms.
The most interesting thing we found is where the wrong number lives. SAG-AFTRA’s own explainer page, the one everybody cites, still says the maximum period of use is twenty-one months and seven thirteen-week cycles. Their own 2025 contract summary says twenty-four. So the union is contradicting the union, and every article built on that explainer page has inherited the error, including the research this page was built from. We are not publishing the doubled ceiling figure at all. The old sources give it as forty-two months, which was twenty-one twice; the arithmetic on the new base would be forty-eight, and we could not confirm that in any union document. A number we cannot stand up is worse than no number.
Which brings back the actual point, now with arithmetic behind it. The restriction lasts two years at the outside. The line on your résumé will sit there for five. So a named brand advertises a permanent restriction where there was only ever a temporary one, to somebody who cannot check and will not spend the time trying.
And here is a correction to our own planned advice. We were going to tell you that you are not released from a conflict until you receive written notice from the advertiser. That comes from one casting office’s blog, and the union’s rule is the opposite in shape. Their published position is that release happens automatically: if the producer has not paid the holding fee by the first day of the new cycle, the performer is released from exclusivity. Nobody has to write to you. Which is precisely why the blog’s caution is still worth something — release is silent, so you get no signal at all. Keep your own dated list of shoots and cycles, because the good résumé says conflicts are available on request, and that is a promise you have to be able to honour.
None of those numbers apply in Britain
Every figure above is American. Our research said so and then left the British half blank, which for a British readership is the more important half. Here it is.
The gap is not that the numbers are different. It is that the system is a different shape. Britain does not use holding fees at all, so there is no thirteen-week cycle to count and no maximum period of use to run out.
1
There is an agreement, and it has four partiesThe Equity, IPA, APA and ISBA Agreed Document in Commercials. The union, the advertising agencies, the production companies and the advertisers, all signed up to one document.
2
You are paid for exposure, not for waitingA transmission fee for the showing, then a use fee calculated from audience ratings and impressions across television, on demand, online, social and outdoor. The money tracks how many people actually saw it.
3
The word that matters is termEquity’s own definition: the period a commercial is live on air from start to end date, assumed to be consecutive months unless specifically negotiated. Exclusivity is bundled into that negotiated term.
4
The thing to watch for is perpetuityBuyouts are common and they are not the problem. A buyout should stipulate a fixed term of usage rather than covering use of the advert forever, and that is the line to read before you sign.
So the practical answer for a British actor is different from the American one, and simpler. There is no cycle to track and no holding fee that might quietly fail to arrive. There is a term, and it is whatever you negotiated. Which means the useful habit is not counting thirteen-week blocks — it is keeping the contract, and knowing the end date written in it. Equity runs a free calculator that works out use fees, and it publishes the glossary those definitions come from, so this is one of the rare cases where the union has done the explaining and almost nobody in the acting-advice world has noticed.
One honest limit. We could not fetch Equity’s own site directly, so the definitions above come from Equity’s own calculator tool and from Spotlight’s contract glossary rather than from the agreement itself. The shape of the system is solid. If you need the exact wording of a clause, get it from Equity rather than from us.
Role type for screen, character name for stage
The single most common formatting mistake after the brand names, and the one with the cleanest reasoning behind it.
On film and television credits you write the size of the part. Lead, supporting, guest star, recurring. On theatre credits you write the character’s name.
Why the split exists at all
StageEveryone knows how big Laertes is. The play tells them.
ScreenNobody knows who Marcus is. The credit tells them nothing.
The consequenceAn unfamiliar character name on a screen credit reads as a small part, because the reader has no other information and will not go and find out.
How to list a student film
Commonly doneLeft off entirely, out of embarrassment.
BetterName the school as the production company. It is a real credit and it reads as one.
The bit people forgetThe same job produced footage. Most actors never ask the student for the export, and it is the only reel material they have.
Marking festival success
The conventionAn asterisk on the credit and a note at the bottom of the page.
Our correctionThe coach usually cited for this said indie films, not short films specifically. We are widening it back to what he actually said.
The error that is not an error
The internet is confident that a photograph on a résumé is amateur hour. On a British CV it is standard, and the real mistake is a different one.
A small thumbnail headshot in the top corner is ordinary practice on a British acting CV, and the trade press here says so plainly. The error on the bad version is not that there is a photograph. It is that the photograph is bad — a low-resolution phone picture, scaled up.
The rule that resolves it, which depends on what the document is doing.
A document that travels alone needs the thumbnail. Emailed, uploaded, forwarded — if it can be separated from your headshot, it needs a face on it.
A document stapled to an eight-by-ten photograph does not. There is already a large picture of you attached to it. The thumbnail is redundant.
So the answer is not yes or no. It is: which of those two objects are you making today?
Forty minutes, and it works for two years
This is the page’s answer to everybody selling you a résumé service. The work is real, but none of it is expertise you have to buy.
Gathering the factsTen minutes. You already own every one of them. Productions, roles, companies, directors, years.
10 min
Deciding role types and orderTen minutes, and this is the actual thinking. Which category leads is an argument about what kind of actor you are.
10 min
Levelling the skills honestlyTen minutes. Conversational, not fluent. Go through every line and ask whether you could demonstrate it this afternoon with no warning.
10 min
FormattingTen minutes, and the least important ten. Build the columns as a real table rather than with tab stops and it will still be readable to anyone using a screen reader.
10 min
Only the second and third ten minutes are difficult, and neither is difficult in a way a paid service can help with. Nobody else can tell you whether your French is conversational. The last step costs nothing either: getting it onto the back of your headshot properly.
Grading the sources
This page was researched to strengthen an argument that was already good. The strengthening figure turned out to be the thing that was wrong.
The claim, and where it came fromWhat we found
A commercial conflict runs twenty-one monthsSAG-AFTRA’s own explainer page
No
Out of date since April 2025. The 2025 contract raised it to twenty-four months. The explainer page still says twenty-one, so the union is contradicting itself and everyone downstream inherited it.
You are not released until you get written noticeA casting office blog
No
The union’s rule is the opposite in shape. Release is automatic when a holding fee is missed. Nobody has to notify you — which is a better reason to keep your own records than the one we were going to give.
The ceiling is forty-two monthsThe same stale page
No
Twenty-one doubled. We could not confirm the replacement figure in any union document, so we are not printing one.
The conflict attaches on the shoot daySAG-AFTRA on holding fees
Primary
Verified at the union rather than at the casting blog our research used. Cycles run from the session date, so it holds even if the spot never airs.
Spotlight does not accept extra workSpotlight’s joining criteria
Primary
Quoted verbatim from their own help centre and current. This is the gate the whole section rests on and it is solid.
Britain uses a different system entirelyEquity’s own calculator and glossary
Primary
The four-party agreement, use fees from ratings and impressions, and the term. The gap our research flagged and left empty.
Backstage contradicts Backstage on brandsTheir template against their advice
Good
Real and current. Their 2025 template asks for a brand column while their own columnists say never to name one. Not overstated.
Calling extra work featured is telling a lieBonnie Gillespie
Good
Real person, real book, quote verbatim on her own site. Dated 2008, not current, and it is quoted everywhere as though it were recent.
A thumbnail is standard on a British CVBackstage UK, September 2023
Good
Verified in a British source rather than an American one, which matters for this particular claim.
Conflicts available upon requestMarci Liroff, July 2022
Fair
Real, and she documents it — but she did not originate it, and another Backstage writer used the same convention the year before. It is an industry habit, not her rule.
Mark festival success with an asteriskAn acting coach, 2015
Fair
Real advice, slightly narrowed in transmission. He said indie films, not short films. We have widened it back.
List the agency and production company, not the productOne acting school’s blog
Fair
The workaround is genuinely there and it is sensible. It is one school’s house style, not an industry standard, and we are labelling it that way.
Two smaller things we have marked down rather than dropped. The thirteen-to-seventeen week cycle range comes from trade press, not from the contract, and the extra exclusivity fee that blocks non-competing products is described by Backstage rather than by the union. Both are probably right. Neither is quoted from the agreement.
Where we differ from the standard account
How long does a commercial conflict last?
Commonly saidTwenty-one months, citing the union.
What we foundTwenty-four since April 2025. The union page everyone cites was never updated.
How do you know you have been released?
Commonly saidWait for written notice from the advertiser.
What we foundRelease is automatic when a holding fee is missed. Nobody writes to you at all.
Do these numbers apply in Britain?
Commonly saidRepeated as though they were universal.
What we foundNo. There are no holding fees here. Use fees are calculated from audience figures over a negotiated term.
Is a photo on a résumé amateur?
Commonly saidNever put your face on it.
What we foundA thumbnail is standard on a British CV. The error is a bad photo, not a photo.
Is extra work worth listing?
Commonly saidIt was a day on a real set.
What we foundIt is the one credit with no record to support it, and Spotlight will not count it towards joining.
Character name or role type?
Commonly saidCharacter names look more specific.
What we foundThey read as smaller. Type for screen, character for stage.
What should you fix first?
Commonly saidThe layout and the font.
What we foundThe font is last. The four things that cost you most are all invisible at a glance.
Do one thing tonight. Find every brand name on your résumé and take it off, because each one advertises a restriction that has very likely already expired to somebody who will not check. Replace the section with one line saying conflicts are available on request — then go and write down the dates, so that when somebody asks, you can actually answer.
