Everything that happens in this business is taste driven. And, as the saying goes, there's no accounting for taste.
It's tough for actors to wrap their head around this fact. Most of the time we think we're being measured against some kind of standard. Guess what? There is no objective standard. However, there are a million subjective standards. Every audition you walk into, you've just run head on into a new standard.
Here's an illustration. When I had my intensive 40-week training program going in the 90s, I brought in a professional casting director to assess the actors in the program. The actors did both monologue and scene work. This was an experienced casting director who's work I respected. However, I'd never sat next to her in a casting situation. How she responded to different actors was intriguing.
At first I saw little or no consistency to how she was responding to the performances of individual actors. Sitting next to her, I could sense her “turning on” or “turning off” as she watched performances.
Logic would dictate that the on/off thing was being triggered by the quality of acting. In a few cases, that seemed to be true. However, the majority of the off/on events were being caused by something else.
Following class she gave me her appraisal of each actor. I could definitely see a correlation between her critiques and her on/off behavior. For the most part she wasn't responding to the acting, she was responding to the degree of access that she had to each actor as a person. The access plus the acting created a singular impression. I don't think she realized this in the least.
In one case she was gushing about a given actor. Technically, his performance had been good but not good enough to warrant this level of enthusiasm. Fact is she was simply responding to him on a purely human level. By nature this actor is a very open, affable kind of guy and these qualities were subliminally present in his performance. That had a tremendous impact on the casting director, so much so that she called him in to audition for a major role in a Disney/Touchstone feature.
Next… Access = Impact