Writer: Takunda Muzondiwa AISLING KNIGHT X AKTA “Why didn't I book the job?” It is a question most actors learn to carry quietly. It lingers in the body after an audition, in the walk home, in the hours spent replaying a tape that now exists somewhere else, being watched by people we may never meet. In an industry that moves quickly and speaks sparingly, the casting process can feel like something happening just beyond our reach. Decisions are made in rooms we are not in. Ch

Writer: Takunda Muzondiwa What I love most about this industry is simultaneously the thing that surprises me most about it. Despite all the valid criticisms about the business being filled with gatekeepers, the cautionary tales of artists who flew too close to the sun and came crashing back down, the endless stream of ragebait comments asking “when are you going to get a real job”, what continues to catch me off guard is how many people are quietly, consistently rooting for

Writer: Takunda Muzondiwa Three's A Crowd (2026) “Make your own work” If actors were paid a pound for every time we heard it, we would be financing cinematic universes so vast they would make Marvel Cinematic Universe look like a student showcase, outspend Star Wars, and give Barbie a run for its perfectly pink money. Instead, what most of us have are fragments. A Notes app crowded with half formed monologues. A title without a plot. A plot without an ending. Dialogue scribb

Writer: Takunda Muzondiwa Shanay x Akta Theatre-goers know the feeling. They dress for it. They pay for it. They sit in their red-velvet seats and wait for it with a quiet, almost superstitious hope. The lights dim. A hush ripples across the auditorium like a held breath. And then, if you are lucky, it happens. An actor reaches across the invisible gulf between stage and stalls and touches something under your ribs. Not your intellect. Not your taste. Something older. Somethi

Writer: Takunda Muzondiwa Adolescence (2025) A North London bus sighs at a red light. A barber sweeps yesterday’s hair into a neat crescent on the pavement. A boy at the back stares out the window, quiet, carrying a talent that will one day make the world stand still. Born and raised in Enfield, Amari Bacchus grew up turning living rooms into wrestling rings and Playmobil figures into entire cinematic worlds. Acting was not strategy. It was instinct. It was joy. That passio

Writer: Takunda Muzondiwa Working Actors Do Not Wait I have always hated waiting rooms. It is both the stillness of them and the strange performance of calm they seem to stage. The soft lighting. The neutral walls. The potted plants that no one waters yet never quite die. And yet everyone sitting there knows something else is happening beneath the surface. Knees bounce. Hands twist together. Eyes glaze over as people pretend to scroll, pretend to read, pretend not to be afra

Writer: Takunda Muzondiwa The business of acting Somewhere tonight, an actor is closing their laptop after uploading a new headshot, trimming a reel by twelve brutal seconds, nudging the margins on a CV so the layout breathes. The room is quiet except for the small, ordinary sounds of a life in progress. A neighbour’s footsteps overhead. A humming radiator. A siren passing like a distant memory of urgency. Nothing about the moment looks cinematic. No swelling score. No stand

Writer: Takunda Muzondiwa I Waiting Rewires the Nervous System No one is auditioning as much as they wish they’d like to. Sometimes Spotlight feels like an abandoned town square. Nothing moves. Nothing arrives. This strange, snail-paced suspension defines so much of an actor’s working life. And then, without warning, that silence breaks. A notification flashes onto your phone. Big text. Urgent tone. Your agent asks you to get a tape in as soon as you can. The shift is violen

Writer: Takunda Muzondiwa I Borrow Other People’s Spotlights to Keep My Own Dream Warm It is awards season. The Hollywood Reporter’s YouTube channel watches its view count quietly quadruple as I do what I do every year: indulge myself on digitised Roundtables, clipped speeches, and softly lit conversations between actors who have made it to the shimmering “other side.” It is my day off from the cafe. I am still in my pyjamas. In the background, Alexander Skarsgård and Stella

Writer: Takunda Muzondiwa Alistair Nwachukwu in A Friend of Dorothy (2025) I Medicine, Law, and Engineering and the Cost of Choosing Otherwise In many African households, the evening meal is loud with warmth. Laughter ricochets between plates of pounded yam, stew soaking into rice, and plantain caramelising at the edges. The room hums with joy but there is one thing Africans do not joke about. Education. In homes where success is often defined by a narrow set of professions,

Writer: Takunda Muzondiwa Tom Bulpett in Dept. Q (2025) I The Boy Who Tried to Enter the Screen The double-beat da-doom lands, its sound low and familiar. Then the red N blooms across the screen, swelling like a sun rising too close to the horizon. A child leans closer. Knees pressed into carpet. Fingers curled on the edge of the TV stand. A voice calls from the kitchen, “Back up, it’s bad for your eyes!” He does not move. The glass holds him the way a tide holds a shell, r

Writer: Takunda Muzondiwa A New Years Resolution Guide for Actors Who Want to Enter 2026 Ready I Days That Slip Through Your Hands I miss the ease of summer. In summer, time spills. In winter, time congeals. It sits heavier in the body and demands to be handled. There is a deliberateness that winter demands. There are fewer hours of light and they must be spent on purpose or they disappear. I’ve been indoors so much that I have become uncomfortably acquainted with how easily

Writer: Takunda Muzondiwa Jazz Jenkins | Akta Photography 3:04am and Other Coordinates of Wanting It is 3:04 a.m. I have just typed what makes a good showreel into Google again. I scroll through articles, bookmark tabs I’ll never read, drag Youtube links into a “watch later” folder swollen like an abandoned suitcase. I turn onto my back and stare at the ceiling. Actors speak of showreels the way sailors used to speak of maps: a precious guide to a place they have never bee

Writer: Takunda Muzondiwa I The Hunger We Do Not Confess To We do not speak of it aloud. The wanting. The impatience. It sits behind the ribs like something half-hatched, warm and fidgeting, refusing us rest. We walk through the West End the way thirsty people pass fountains—pretending we’re just out for air while our insides press up against our skin, craning for a taste. The pavements glitter with last night's rain and every theatre door looks like a portal when we stare lo

Writer: Takunda Muzondiwa Joe Tracini on Mental Health and the Art of Being Bruised and Beautiful Joe Tracini (Photo: Akta Photography) I An Introduction to Honesty and Vulnerability Rarely is it that someone's work tears you open like a cut fruit left out in the sun, equal parts sweetness and bruise. Joe Tracini’s work does that. It brutalises you in the gentlest way, leaving you tender, aware again of your own fragility. Even more rarely is it that, within the same breath,

To network is to be confronted with yourself in ways rehearsal cannot touch. Auditions expose whether you can act; networking exposes whether you can stomach yourself.

In its simplest definition, casting type refers to the range of roles you are most likely to be considered for, based on your outward qualities; your age range, look, energy, vocal tone, even the way you enter a room. It is an external reading of your essence... These categories are shorthand for marketing departments and casting directors juggling hundreds of submissions, not prophecies to be carved into your bones.

Writer: Takunda Muzondiwa I The Mirage of the Overflowing Inbox There are many ways in which my writing of this blog has come to feel confessional. A confession of my obsessive inbox refreshing. My Alice-like descents into rabbit hole forums for tips from others who have come to mistake their scarcity of booking for proof of their failures. I am a ritualistic person. It often begins with opening my email, refreshing, waiting, refreshing again, as if the clicking might summon

When an aspiring actor asks, “Do I need to go to drama school?”, they are not asking about education in the abstract. They are asking whether the doors will still open without that key. They are asking if legitimacy is conferred by a building, a tuition bill, a certificate. Or if it can be self-forged in the fires of lived experience. The short answer is no, one does not need drama school in order to make it. The longer answer (the one that matters) is that the craft demands

If we may, Akta would like to offer a quiet rebellion, or rather a necessary provocation that may see us turned into the black sheep of the family: There is no such thing as acting for screen and acting for stage. There is only acting. Whether you are framed by red velvet curtains or a 35mm prime lens, the work remains the same: courage, commitment, and connection.