What "Right for the Role" Actually Means (And Why It's Not About Your Acting)

Every actor has heard it. You gave a solid audition. You prepared thoroughly. You felt good about the work. And then your agent calls: "They loved you, but they went another way."

Or worse: nothing. Silence. Which you interpret as rejection, which you interpret as failure, which you interpret as evidence that you're not good enough.

But here's what most actors don't understand about that moment: in the majority of cases, the decision had very little to do with your acting.

The Jigsaw Problem

A director casting a role isn't looking for the best actor. They're looking for the right actor. And those can be  very different things.

Think of it this way. A director has a script. That script contains characters who serve specific functions within the story. Each character exists in relation to other characters — parent and child, boss and employee, lovers, rivals, friends. The director's job is to assemble an ensemble where those relationships are instantly believable on screen.

That's a jigsaw puzzle. And the director needs specific pieces.

When you walk into an audition, the director isn't starting from zero. They already have some of the jigsaw in place — certainly the lead actors, probably several key supporting roles. What they're looking for now is a piece that fits the gap. The one that completes the picture.

What Type Really Means

Most actors think of "type" in fairly crude terms: age, gender, build, ethnicity. Those matter, of course. If the breakdown says "FRANK, 60s, retired military," a twenty-five-year-old woman isn't getting seen for that role regardless of her talent.

But type goes much deeper than physical characteristics. It's the quality you project on camera before you've said a word. It's the energy you carry into a room. It's whether you naturally come across as warm or cool, open or guarded, cerebral or instinctive.

This is why two equally talented actors can audition for the same role and one "feels right" while the other doesn't — and neither can be told exactly why. The director is responding to something deeper than technique. They're reading your natural energy and matching it, often unconsciously, to what the story requires.

I've written about this deeper layer — what I call the three centres of Head, Heart, and Gut — in Why Talented Actors Get Stuck on my Substack. What I want to explore here is how that same principle shapes casting decisions, not just performances.

A Story From the Floor

I once had to cast the role of a caring father whose teenage son had been accused of theft. The actor who came in was experienced and well established — he's since gone on to play leading roles in feature films — and he came in to meet me, but wouldn't read for the role.

I wasn't sure. Something felt off. I wasn't getting the right energy from him. But casting was running very late, the shoot was only three days away, and so I was obliged to cast him anyway.

What the script required was a father whose authority came from warmth and concern — a man who would be deeply troubled by the accusation but would handle it with measured, thoughtful gravity. On reflection, I can now see that the character needed to be led by his Head: calm, considered, principled.

What I got on set was an actor whose natural energy was led by his Gut: forceful, instinctive, physically present. None of those qualities is wrong — they're what make him excellent in the roles he's built his career on. But his scenes with the boy simply didn't work. The caring father came across as intimidating. The dynamic between them was off in a way that no amount of direction could fix, because the problem wasn't his performance. The problem was his energy.

When the producer saw the playback, he ordered a reshoot with a different actor — someone who was immediately, obviously right for the role.

Why This Matters to You

That story contains several things worth noting.

First: the original actor was good. Genuinely good. He has a significant career. This wasn't a failure of talent — it was a mismatch of type. His natural energy didn't fit the function of the character in the story. That's not a criticism of the actor. It's a reality of how casting works.

Second: I knew something was wrong before we started shooting. I could feel it. But I couldn't have explained it precisely at the time. This is what makes the process so frustrating for actors. The people making the decisions are often responding to something they can't fully articulate. "Not right for the role" is the honest answer, but it sounds like a brush-off.

Third: the reshoot caused serious upheaval. Productions don't reshoot scenes on a whim. A reshoot disrupts a tight schedule, costs significant money, and affects everyone on the production. And the director who miscast the original actor — for whatever reason — is less likely to be hired by that producer again. That's how much "right for the role" matters to the people financing the work. Getting it wrong has consequences that go far beyond one scene.

The Liberating Truth

Here's why this should change how you think about apparent “rejection”.

If you audition well and don't get the role, the most likely explanation isn't that you weren't good enough. It's that you weren't the right jigsaw piece for that particular puzzle. Another actor walked in whose natural energy — the thing they can't fake and you can't fake — happened to match what the director needed.

That's not a judgment on your ability. It's not something you could have fixed with more preparation. It's certainly not a reason to question whether you're talented enough.

It simply means that a particular role needed a different piece.

The actors who understand this — really understand it, not just nod at it — handle rejection differently. They stop treating every "no" as a verdict on their worth. They start treating it as information: that role needed something I don't naturally project. Which means there are other roles out there that need exactly what I do project.

The question then becomes: do you know what that is? Do you know what you naturally bring to a screen? Do you know what kind of piece you are?

Because if you don't, you're applying for every gap in every jigsaw and wondering why you only occasionally fit.

That's what screen type is really about. Not a limitation. A compass.

The Alchemy of Screen Acting: Building a Sustainable Career in 21 Steps will be published soon as a complete guide. Each step builds on the previous one, taking you from wherever you are now to working professionally with casting directors actively seeking you out for suitable roles.

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Header image: Tanja Tepavac on Unsplash