Format, Length, Margins, Font, Paper

We went looking for the sources behind every formatting rule in circulation. Some of them are solid — named, current, from people who cast for a living. Some of them turned out to be a blog post quoting a blog post quoting a print shop that sells paper.

So this chapter is organised by confidence, not by topic. What is unanimous, what is convention, and what is invented. That ordering is unusual, and it is the whole value of the page.

One page. Unanimous. Not negotiable.

Every single source we read says this, and they say it without hedging.

Backstage’s theatre guide: “A theater résumé should be brief and no longer than one page.” Acting coach Denise Simon: “Your résumé should be on one page only.” Acting Studio Chicago, in capital letters on its own page: “YOUR RESUME MUST FIT ON ONE 8×10 PIECE OF PAPER.”

Four sources, two countries, no dissent. When a rule is this unanimous it usually means the reason is structural rather than cultural — and it is. The document is scanned, not read. A second page is not a second chance. It is a page nobody turns.

And there is exactly one honest way to solve a résumé that will not fit, which we will come back to: you cut credits. You do not shrink the type.

8x10 — real, but not law, and its territory has shrunk

The famous rule. Trim your résumé to eight inches by ten, because that is the size of a North American headshot and the résumé is stapled to the back of it. US Letter paper is 8.5 × 11. An 8x10 photograph is smaller. Staple one to the other and half an inch of paper flaps past the edge of the picture.

That mechanism is real and physical, and it is why the rule exists. But we are about to tell you something nobody else on the internet will.

Now here is the practical advice anyway, because we are not in the business of being clever at your expense. Trim it. It costs you thirty seconds and a pair of scissors. Not trimming it costs you the risk of looking like somebody who has never seen this done — and in a theatre lobby, holding paper, in front of a person, that is the actual cost. The rule may be unenforced. The convention is entirely real, and being visibly outside a convention is its own signal.

What has genuinely changed is where the rule applies. It has retreated to the places where paper still physically changes hands — theatre auditions, open calls, regional and college auditions, agent meetings. On a film or TV self-submission your résumé is a database record and nobody is holding paper at all. Chapter XI is the whole honest account of that.

Fonts and sizes: what is sourced, and what is guesswork

Here is the honest table. We are giving you our own recommendations too — clearly labelled as ours, not smuggled in as industry law.

SOURCED — a named professional says this
────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
LENGTH        One page. Unanimous across every source we found.
BODY SIZE     “Everything else should be in size 11 or 12.”  — Backstage UK
              (US sources say 10–12pt. Same range.)
NAME          Larger than everything else. Liroff: “large enough to
              stand out on the page.”  NO SOURCE GIVES A POINT SIZE.
FONT FAMILY   Arial · Times New Roman · Verdana named as safe by
              Backstage UK. Helvetica named elsewhere.
              NO FONT IS MANDATED ANYWHERE.
DON’T SHRINK  “don’t make the font size smaller, as people need to
              glance at your CV, not study it with a magnifying
              glass.”  — Backstage UK
ALIGNMENT     “When separating your columns, don’t use spaces. Tabs
              ensure that each item lines up vertically.”  — Backstage
PAPER (US)    8x10, to match the headshot. Convention, from a physical
              fact. Not sourced to any casting director.
PAPER (UK)    A4. Nothing is trimmed.


NOT SOURCED — convention, or our own recommendation, clearly labelled
────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
MARGINS       NO SOURCE SPECIFIES MARGINS. Every “0.5 inch margins”
              claim traces back to résumé-template content.
              OUR RECOMMENDATION: 0.5–0.75in, even on all four sides,
              and stated as ours.
NAME SIZE     OUR RECOMMENDATION: 18–24pt. Not a rule. A design choice.
COLOUR        Avoid. Convention. Widely repeated, sourced to nobody.
GRAPHICS      No skill bars. No logos. No colour blocks. Convention.
CARD STOCK    “Print on 24lb / photo paper / card” — PRINT-SHOP CONTENT.
              They sell paper. Ignore it.
BACK OF       Advised against everywhere; sourced to nobody. The REASON
HEADSHOT      is sound: you need different résumés for theatre, film and
              commercial, and pre-printed stock makes every earlier run
              waste. Take the reason. The rule is just a rule.

Read the bottom half again. The margin measurement you have seen quoted on twenty acting blogs has no source at all. Every trail we followed ended at a company selling résumé templates. We are giving you a number because you asked for one, and we are telling you it is ours.

Tabs, not spaces

Small, boring, and it is the single most concrete piece of craft in this whole chapter — the sort of instruction that only comes from somebody who has actually built one of these documents.

If you have ever opened a résumé and watched the third column stagger down the page like a drunk, that is what spacebar alignment looks like. A casting director’s eye slides straight off a misaligned table. Set your tab stops once and every credit lands in the same place forever, on every machine, in every reader, for the rest of your career.

And export a PDF. The .docx is your working file; the PDF is what you send. A Word file that looked perfect on your laptop can arrive at a casting office with the columns collapsed into porridge. Chapter II has the full argument and the template itself.

There is no ATS. There is no keyword score. There is nothing to optimise.

You will be told to optimise your acting résumé for applicant tracking software. To load it with keywords. To avoid columns and tables because “the parser can’t read them.”

There is no applicant tracking system between an actor and a casting director. None. It does not exist. Casting works from breakdowns, submissions and human eyes. Nothing is being parsed. Nothing is being scored. A three-column table is not a formatting risk; it is the entire convention.

What to do when it will not fit

It will not fit. Everyone hits this. Here is the order of operations, and it is not the one people reach for.

Do not shrink the font. Backstage UK, quoted above, is unusually blunt about this and it is the right instinct — a 9pt résumé announces that you could not bear to cut anything, which is itself a statement about your judgement.

Cut credits instead. Backstage’s musical theatre guide gives the only numerical guidance on credit count we found anywhere, from anyone: “Keep to five to seven or so credits per category. This isn’t a hard and fast rule, but after a while, important items you want the casting team or director to see will get lost under too much information. Select the credits that speak for you best.”

Five to seven, per category, and the source itself says it is not a hard rule. Then use the standing convention that exists precisely for this: “Additional theatre credits available upon request.” You have named your best six. You have signalled there are more. You have kept the page.

Then delete the empty headings. A section marked TELEVISION with nothing beneath it is worse than no television section, because it draws the eye to an absence. If you have no credits in a category, the category is not empty — it is gone.

The layout, in the order it goes

Name. Union status. Contact — never a home address. Physical stats and playing age. Then credits, separated by medium and never merged, in three columns — or four, which is also correct, and consistency is the actual rule. Then training. Then special skills.

The order of the credit blocks changes depending on who is reading it. Screen leads with film. Theatre leads with theatre. That is not a stylistic flourish, it is a different document for a different room, and it is Chapter VIII.

One last thing, and it is the reason this chapter is shorter on rules than you expected. There is no governing body here. No certification, no committee, no standard. There is a strong convention with real disagreements at the edges, and anyone selling you “the one industry-standard acting résumé format” is selling you a blog post with a price tag. Build it clean, build it consistent, build it on one page — and then go and spend the time you saved on the audition.