How to recover from a bad audition

Don't dwell
We all have bad days. If you have a bad audition, don’t let it affect your whole day and definitely don’t let it affect your next interview. You won’t get every audition you go for, for a variety of reasons, and we can’t always be at our best all the time.

One bad audition will not affect all your future prospects, however carrying around the memory of a bad audition could get in the way of any future opportunities.

Are you sure you did badly?
Casting directors are looking for a number of qualities in an audition, including appearance and demeanour. It is possible to have a bad audition but to still impress the casting director and get a call back for a second chance. 

It is also common to leave with a different impression of how it went from the casting director's. For this reason, you must never show them you thought it was a bad audition.

If you did, why?
If you did have a bad audition then it's important to try to figure out why. Try to analyse what went wrong, why and attempt to irradiate this in the future. We constantly learn and evolve as people and careful consideration – sentence not finished....

Start again
If you have just started your audition and you realise it is really not going well then it is OK to start again or ask to. Don’t ask to read the whole scene again unless absolutely necessary. If you make huge mistakes very early on there is no harm in saying you will start again, letting the camera operator reset and then beginning from the start. 

It is important not to make a big deal of this, also, attracting less attention to the mistake and showing the casting director, director or producer that you can be precise and simply start again.

Keep a diary of audition
A good system is keeping a log of things that might have gone wrong in past auditions. By doing this you might find a pattern of bad behaviour or something you had not noticed before that will help to improve future performances.