Your headshot is the first thing a casting director or agent sees. It often sits in a grid of tiny images among hundreds, sometimes thousands, of actors. It is the first-round decider of whether your profile gets a click. It has to work hard for you, so there should be no cutting corners!

The life of an actor is not an easy one. It’s unpredictable, competitive, and full of rejection. At the heart of it, what keeps actors going is a love for the craft.

Many adults have wondered what might have happened if they’d pursued acting. It was something they loved doing at school or college, but life got in the way. Work, family, responsibilities. Now they’re in a completely different career, but the idea of acting still lingers in the background. Sound familiar?

Let’s not sugar-coat it. Acting is hard! Not just technically or creatively, though that’s true too, but emotionally. It asks you to be open, brave, vulnerable. To dig deep. To connect. And then it often answers back with silence.

Let’s take a closer look at what Spotlight is, why it matters, and why more and more actors and industry bodies are beginning to question whether it's still serving us as well as it once did.

So you’ve finished this part of your training. You feel ready to get started, but now what?