Headshot + Résumé: Trimming, Stapling, Submitting

A metal desk stapler resting on the corner of a stack of blank white paper

The question does not arise in Britain

Our research admitted it had nothing on British practice and called that the more important half for this readership. It was right, and the answer is not a British version of the ritual. It is a different object.

The American problem is that a photograph is eight by ten and a résumé is letter-sized, so one has to be trimmed to match the other. Britain does not solve that problem. It avoids it.

What a British acting CV actually is.

A single sheet of A4 with a small headshot printed on it, in the top corner, filling roughly the top quarter of the page.

Two independent British trade sources describe exactly that layout. Nothing is attached to anything. There is one object, and it comes out of a printer.

So the ten-by-eight photograph and the A4 CV are not two halves of one document here. They are separate things that do separate jobs.

Paper has not disappeared, though. We found live British audition notices asking for hard copies — a cruise line’s open audition, a pantomime ensemble call, a touring musical’s open call — and all of them say the same thing, which is bring a CV and a headshot. None of them says how to attach them, because in Britain nobody does.

And the British trade press stops at exactly the same place. Backstage’s own British CV guide, from September 2023, gives one sentence on the physical object: “Generally, actors don’t have to post their CVs now. But if you do, attach a full-size headshot on photo-quality paper.” That is the entire instruction. No method, no measurement, no corners. We looked hard for a British source describing a stapling convention and found none at any level — not the platform, not the trade press, not the drama schools whose audition pages we could read. So the honest finding is that this is an American ritual and Britain has quietly answered the question a different way. If you are printing a CV for a British audition tomorrow, put the photo on the page and put the scissors away.

What the union actually recommends

This page’s central finding was that nobody in casting is on record demanding the ritual. That still holds. But the list of places it survives was missing the most important one.

Actors’ Equity Association recommends the staple. In its guidance to producers writing casting notices, under preparation, its own words are: “We recommend reminding performers to bring a picture/resume stapled together.”

The elementDoes the union say it?

Stapled togetherThe attachment itself

Yes

Recommended in the union’s own producer guidance. Addressed to producers rather than to actors, and framed as a recommendation rather than a requirement.

Trimmed to eight by tenThe cutting

Not mentioned anywhere. We read the principal audition procedures document in full.

All four cornersThe placement

Not mentioned. This comes from a trade guide and an acting school, not from the union.

Prongs on the résumé sideThe orientation

Not mentioned. The most specific instruction in the whole ritual has the least institutional backing of any part of it.

And there is a problem with citing it that this page cannot ignore, because date-sensitivity is the standard we hold everybody else to. The union page carrying that sentence has no revision date on it at all. The only date anywhere on it refers to auditions returning in person in January 2023, which is not a timestamp for the guidance. The two audition procedure documents linked from that same page do carry dates — one revised in 2017, one in 2023 — and neither of them contains the staple sentence. So we can tell you the union recommends it. We cannot tell you when it decided to. That is a real limit and we would rather print it than quietly imply the line is current.

Which leaves the refined version of the finding, and it is sharper than the one we had. One element of the ritual is recommended by the organisation that runs the auditions. The trim, the corner count and the prong direction are recommended by schools, studios and printers.

A folding table with a clipboard and a stack of blank papers in an empty corridor

The reason we were going to give you does not exist

Our research proposed a much better argument than any threat: that at an open audition your materials are collected even if you are never seen, so the paper is a submission in its own right. It could not source it. Neither could we.

The line we were going to publish is that leaving your materials with the monitor makes it a passive form of auditioning. It is a good phrase and it does a lot of work.

We could not find it

We searched for the exact wording and for close paraphrases across the sites it was supposed to have come from. Zero real matches. Not in the article it was attributed to, and not anywhere else.

And the union does not support the mechanism

We read the principal audition procedures, the chorus call procedures, the appointment procedures and the archived pandemic protocol. Not one of them describes monitors collecting materials from performers who were not seen, or casting reviewing them afterwards.

What does exist

Blogs mentioning drop-off options at some auditions. Real practice, quite possibly. Not a documented procedure, and nothing we would build a chapter’s central argument on.

So we are withdrawing itIt was going to be the best reason on the page and we cannot stand it up. If a monitor takes your materials, good. We are not going to tell you that is how the system works when the system’s own documentation does not say so.

What survives without it is smaller and true. Bring copies because you may be asked for extras, which every secondary source agrees on and no union or producing body puts a number to. Three costs nothing. And the honest reason to make the object properly is the one this page always had: it takes thirty seconds and a pair of scissors, and it is the only part of the day you fully control.

The audition queue changed four months ago

Almost every description of how an American open audition works is now out of date, including one we published ourselves earlier in this section.

The standard account has three tiers: union members are seen first, then membership candidates, then everybody else if there is time. That middle tier is gone.

The candidate programme was wound down

Actors’ Equity phased it out alongside its open access membership policy, first announced in 2023.

And the audition priority ended this year

Their own words: as of 8 May 2026, candidates are no longer recognised for prioritised audition access and are seen on the same basis as other non-union actors.

So the queue is now two tiers, not three

Members, then everybody else if time allows. The union’s own appointment procedures for cities outside the main three already say exactly that, with no mention of a middle tier.

And the stale version is everywhere

Including on the union’s own site, which still hosts an expired pandemic-era protocol describing the old priority. That one at least is dated, so you can see it has lapsed.

We should own that this corrects something we published on our own theatre chapter a short while ago. We told you the candidate programme was phased out in 2023, which was true of the membership route. What we did not have was that the audition priority survived until this May. So if you read that page before today, the correction is that the change is more recent and more complete than we said. We are also flagging what this looks like from outside: several current, confident sources still describe the three-tier queue as live, and they are all now wrong. This chapter’s own advice will need re-checking too, and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise.

The American ritual, precisely

If you are auditioning in the United States, here is the convention as the sources actually state it, with the tier of each source attached.

The most specific version is from a trade guide updated in September 2023. Staple the headshot to the résumé at all four corners, a quarter of an inch from the photo’s edges, with the headshot facing up so the staple pinchers are visible on the résumé side.

Four corners, quarter of an inchTrade press, dated. An acting school’s guidance says the same thing in capitals — flat side of the staple on the headshot, prongs on the résumé.

Do it

Trim the résumé to matchBecause letter paper is taller than an eight by ten. The school says you might have to trim the edges, and left-aligning the text first turns it into two cuts rather than four.

Do it

Why the prongs face that wayA pile of forty of these gets picked up, shuffled, carried and dropped. Prongs facing out catch on the photograph underneath. Nobody sources this and it is almost certainly why the rule exists.

Our reasoning

Printing it on the back insteadSome casting people discourage it because they prefer to separate the two for filing, and the trade guidance notes plainly that it makes updating your résumé more complicated. It turns a free edit into a reprint.

Think twice

Note what happened to the tiers there. The union recommends the staple. A trade publication supplies the measurement. An acting school supplies the prong direction. We supply the reason. Each step down that list is a step further from anybody who runs an audition.

A tall untidy stack of blank papers piled on the corner of an office desk

Upload it and bring it anyway

Our page said the staple is on life support. It is, and the life support is now split between the room and an upload form, which an actor cannot predict in advance.

A regional theatre’s union audition notice this April asked performers to submit a current headshot and résumé to an online system, while refusing video auditions entirely. The room stayed physical. The paperwork went digital.

We are being careful about how far to push that, because our research warned us not to generalise from one theatre and it was right. The system named in that notice is a third-party scheduling platform, not anything the union operates, and another regional theatre’s current guidance uses a completely different vendor with the opposite video policy. So advance digital submission is real and reasonably common among regional theatres, and it is not standardised in any way. Also worth knowing: the notice we were sent to verify has since come down, because the audition passed — we confirmed the wording from a mirrored trade listing. And that particular call was producer-run by appointment, with no union monitor at all, which is a different thing from the open audition this chapter is mostly about. The practical instruction survives all of that: upload whatever they ask for, and bring paper anyway.

What you actually send

For everything that is not a room with a table in it, the file matters more than the paper, and one detail on it matters more than the rest.

One PDF, containing both, named properly. Not two attachments, not a Word file. The name is your name and what the document is, because it lands in a folder with two hundred others.

And a correction to how we have been citing the safety point.

We have said that a home address does not belong on a résumé, citing a casting platform. What that platform actually publishes is a statement about itself, not advice to you.

Their words, under a heading about security: your physical address and email address are not provided to casting, and only approved casting directors can see your phone number.

So it is evidence that a serious platform treats your address as something to withhold. It is not a formatting instruction, and we should not have presented it as one. The conclusion is the same and the reasoning is better: the platform protects it, and a piece of paper handed to strangers cannot.

One more reason the file outranks the paper. The document you send is the one that has to be readable — twelve point at minimum, a plain sans serif, and columns built as a real table rather than with tab stops, so that assistive technology can follow it. A stapled photograph has no such problem and no such obligation. The PDF does both jobs and reaches more people.

Stale advice, including one we could not find

This chapter catalogues conventions preserved past their expiry by content quoting content. Here is the current example, and an honest note about how the check went.

Colour, always. The trade guidance is explicit that black and white headshots are all but obsolete, and one photographer’s line in the same piece is the sharpest version of why it matters: present a black and white shot today and some people will assume you have not auditioned since 2005.

Our research said the black and white instruction is still findable in print, and we could not confirm that. We went looking for a live page still telling actors to bring a black and white headshot and found only pages debunking it. So the accurate version is narrower: the advice is remembered rather than currently published, at least anywhere we could reach. We are including it because the memory is the problem — a convention does not need to be in print to be passed on by a teacher who learned it in 2004. And because it demonstrates the thing this chapter keeps running into, which is that the shelf life of casting advice is much shorter than the internet’s memory of it.

Grading the sources

This chapter’s research corrected our central finding and then handed us an argument that turned out to have no source at all. Both of those were useful.

The claim, and where it came fromWhat we found

Materials are collected and reviewed later, making the paper a passive auditionAttributed to a careers site

We could not find the quote anywhere, in the article it was credited to or elsewhere. And no union procedure describes the mechanism. Withdrawn entirely.

The queue is members, then candidates, then everybody elseStandard everywhere

Candidate audition priority ended on 8 May 2026, per the union’s own words. This also corrects something we published ourselves.

Britain does a version of this ritualAssumed by omission

Britain prints a thumbnail on the A4 CV instead. Two independent British trade sources describe that layout. The stapling question does not arise.

The black and white instruction is still in printOur research

Unfound

We found only pages debunking it. The advice is remembered rather than published, which we have said instead.

The union recommends staplingIts own producer guidance

Verified

Quoted verbatim and correctly described as guidance to producers. But the page carries no revision date, which we are flagging rather than hiding.

The union says nothing about trim, corners or prongsIts procedures documents

Primary

Confirmed by reading the principal audition procedures in full. The most specific parts of the ritual have the least institutional backing.

No British stapling convention existsOur own search

Null

Searched at platform, trade press and drama school level. The British trade guide stops at “attach a full-size headshot on photo-quality paper” and gives no method at all.

Four corners, a quarter of an inch, photo facing upTrade press, September 2023

Good

Verified verbatim and dated. An acting school independently gives the same prong direction, in capitals, on a page updated this May.

Printing on the back complicates updatesThe same trade guide

Good

Verbatim, plus a reason we did not have: some casting people prefer to separate the two for filing.

Bring multiple copiesAn acting website, March 2025

Weak

Real and dated, but the site is a high-volume content operation rather than a trade publication. No union or producer specifies a number at all.

Uploads are replacing the handoverOne 2026 notice

Partial

Real, and the notice has since been taken down, so we verified it from a mirror. Third-party vendors, not a union system, and not standardised between theatres.

The address safety pointA platform’s own page

Reframed

Real and correctly quoted, but it is a statement about what the platform withholds, not advice about your document. We were citing it as the wrong kind of thing.

And one question that has now been flagged in five separate pieces of research. Whether the casting platforms accept an uploaded résumé document is finally settled, and the answer is untidy. Spotlight does not take one at all. Casting Networks does, in PDF only. And for Actors Access we have to correct ourselves — we previously called it a hybrid, but their own current documentation describes typing credits into three columns and does not offer a document upload. The upload claim traces only to third-party blogs. We are marking it unconfirmed rather than repeating it.

Where we differ from the standard account

Do British actors staple a CV to a headshot?

Commonly saidAssumed, because the American guidance is everywhere.

What we foundNo. The British CV carries a printed thumbnail. There is one object, not two.

Does anybody institutional demand the ritual?

Commonly saidTaught as one indivisible convention.

What we foundThe union recommends the staple only. Trimming, corners and prongs come from schools and printers.

Are your materials reviewed if you are not seen?

Commonly saidYes, so leave them with the monitor.

What we foundNo union procedure says so, and the quote this rests on could not be found anywhere.

Who gets seen first at an open audition?

Commonly saidMembers, then membership candidates, then the rest.

What we foundCandidate priority ended in May 2026. Two tiers now, and most guidance has not caught up.

Is paper being replaced by uploads?

Commonly saidEither yes or no, depending who you ask.

What we foundBoth, unevenly, through unrelated third-party systems. Upload what they ask and bring paper anyway.

Should the headshot be black and white?

Commonly saidStill repeated by people taught in the nineties.

What we foundColour, always. And we could not find the old advice still in print, only in memory.

Can you upload a PDF to a casting platform?

Commonly saidAssumed everywhere.

What we foundSpotlight, no. Casting Networks, PDF only. Actors Access, not in their own documentation.

Do one thing tonight. If you are in Britain, check that your CV has a headshot printed on it — top corner, filling about the top quarter — because that is the whole convention here and it takes one edit. If you are auditioning in America, staple four corners a quarter inch in and stop reading advice about it, including ours.

The whole ritual is American. British practice does not staple two objects together at all — it prints a small headshot onto the single A4 CV, which is why the size mismatch this page has been worrying about never actually arises here.