The Golden Rules of Acting - by Andy Nyman Paperback

About the Book

The actor's best friend. A treasure trove of advice, support and encouragement that no performer should be without.

Book Synopsis

"Andy's distilled guidebook is smart, hilarious, and just might get you work!" - Neil Patrick Harris

A treasure trove of advice, support and encouragement that no performer should be without. Honest, witty and direct, The Golden Rules of Acting is every actor's best friend - in handy paperback form.

'When auditioning, rehearsing or in a performance, take a risk - the worst that can happen is that you get embarrassed. You won't die.'

Easy to dip into, fully illustrated throughout, and designed to be both instructive and empowering, The Golden Rules of Acting won't tell you how to act - but it will tell you how to be an actor.

'Always remember, the people auditioning you want you to be brilliant. They want you to solve their casting problem.'

If you're a working actor, drama-school student, someone who wants to become an actor, or simply someone who has a dream and wants to make it a reality, this book is for you.

'NEVER harmonise when singing 'Happy Birthday' - this has nothing to do with work, it's just all actors do it & it's bloody annoying.'

Andy Nyman learnt the golden rules of acting the hard way, through twenty-five years of working in theatre, film and television. On stage, he co-wrote, co-directed and starred in the West End hit Ghost Stories, and won an Olivier Award for Best Entertainment for co-writing and directing Something Wicked This Way Comes with his regular collaborator Derren Brown. His many film appearances include Severance and Frank Oz's Death at a Funeral.

'Christians have the Bible, now actors have this book. At last, everyone is happy.' - Simon Pegg

'Like its author, this little book is packed full of wit, wisdom and good things.' - Matthew Macfadyen

'A wonderful insight into the secrets of success that will help anyone achieve their dreams.' - Richard Wiseman (author, 59 Seconds: Think a little, change a lot)

Review Quotes

"The book won't tell you how to act, but will tell you how to be an actor, how to stay sane and succeed in any creative position, if you have a dream and want to make it a reality it'll offer you properly useful advice. It's one of those books that helps you know yourself, ask the right questions, and reminds you to be happy. It is truthful, eye-opening and insightful, reading it feels like getting tips and advice from a friend down the pub; it is a goldmine of information. I'm no actor, but it's one of those books that I'll carry with me, return to time and time again because remembering this advice will help me become a better and happier person." - Huffington Post

"A little book but great fun... Presented in large print with jokey soundbites, occasional speech bubbles and stylised on-page annotation, The Golden Rules of Acting covers drama school, auditions, agents, directors, dealing with reviews and various other aspects of living an actor's life with wit. "Remember the best part about drama school is that you get to spend all day acting. Cherish that, you may have to wait a long time until it happens again," opines Nyman wisely. I liked his well-made point that success in this business is a marathon not a sprint. Samuel L Jackson was 46 when he made Pulp Fiction and Morgan Freeman 52 when he starred in Driving Miss Daisy. Nyman's advice about having a decent website and keeping a record of everyone you meet with a note of when and where is sensible too. I think it's worth the cover price for the quotations alone. Threaded through the book are gems such as Michael Caine's "I'm a skilled professional actor. Whether I have any talent or not is beside the point" and Mark Twain's "The harder I work, the luckier I get."...If you get only one useful nugget it will have paid for itself. -- The Stage

"The cover of this book has a splash star on it reading 'Over one million copies sold.' Then an asterisk, and the asterisk note says Completely untrue... (and continues.) Well, this book should have sold over a million copies and I'm sure it will. It's unique. A mixture of streetwise good sense and hilarious sometimes laugh-out-loud wit. It contains some 200 (I'm guessing) bites of good advice or quotations; every single one of them worthwhile reading. But there's wit too in NHB's production of the volume. Just in the way an actor might annotate a script, Nyman annotates this book with highlights, handwritten comments, capital letters. And colour too. The whole effect is one of irrepressible joie-de-vivre... which, in a way, underpins Nyman's survival technique. It's what's enabled him to be a jobbing actor for more than 20 years - a somewhat successful jobbing actor judging by his website.
Here's a taster: 'I deny that I said actors are cattle. What I said was actors should be treated like cattle.' (Alfred Hitchcock.) But my real favourite is the RSC director speaking to soldiers after a rehearsal of Henry V. He says: ...(No, I'm not giving that one away!) One of the most entertaining writers about psychology (inspiring yourself, self motivation, luck et al) is Professor Richard Wiseman (endorsing this book on the back cover)... and, moreover, his writing is academically and empirically based. Much of what Nyman is putting forward in his amusing way fits within Wiseman's framework. Without doubt, Nyman hits the nail home at every turn... This is an indispensable life saver and survival kit. Not a coffee table book. Keep it on the dinner table (where you can regularly dip into it)." - reviewsgate.com

"Christians have the Bible, now actors have this book. At last, everyone is happy." - Simon Pegg