Mandy

Mandy Actors USA provides a great service actors, with a wide range of Casting Calls of all diversities.

Mandy is such a worthwhile and actually seriously INVALUABLE resource for anyone in the film/ theatre/TV Industry... check it out!

As previously mentioned, it used to be "OK" when it was free, but it's a farce now you have to pay. I've 10 years+ of professional experience on international films and TV but have paid a couple of times for a monthly subscription so I can see the info about a couple of specific jobs.

My negative rating isn't purely down to the fact that it's a particularly bad site because it's alright - you have a profile page, can upload docs like CV, list contact details and references etc - but largely due to the fact that it is, and always has been, populated by arrogant and ignorant wankers who a lot of the time don't actually know what they're doing or anything about the industry.

Even when I was looking for unpaid opportunities starting out, I probably received one reply from every hundred apps if I was lucky. Nothing's changed despite having a strong portfolio now and seeking paid work, which a lot of the time is pitiful - my day rate is more than what's offered for a feature film!

People posting jobs there should also really learn that if they're offering very low if any pay, they shouldn't have the tenacity to list ridiculous demands of applicants to be professional experts with 50 feature film credits, able to provide a Dolby Atmos studio in the heart of Soho for 6 months free of charge, have Scorsese, Spielberg and Tarantino's numbers on speed dial, be able to secure an international release deal and bring Hitchcoc back from the dead to direct their film... but it's OK, because you'll get an IMDB credit and copy of the DVD for your hard work.

If it was free I wouldn't have written this review, but it's cost me money so thought I'd relay some facts. Hopefully it won't be too long before someone provides a solution by setting up a free, user serviced website to provide competition and get film industry staff working a bit more collaboratively.

UPDATE: still not a single job from it since originally posting this.

First the good.

I'm an industry professional of 7 years - a jobbing actor as it were - and I can thank Mandy (or really, Casting Call Pro as it was before it was bought out) for helping me to establish my career. It was, for a long time, a brilliant platform on which to gain invaluable experience, and has led to contacts who I still work with 6-7 years down the line. It was a great pool for corporate work, short and student films and fringe theatre, with an intuitive and helpful interface, and a range of features that really gave me a sense of ownership over my career - it allowed me to track my applications, to see their status, and yielded really positive outcomes. The cost of an annual subscription was easily recouped.

The bad news is that Mandy has recently been bought out by Backstage. Since its takeover, Mandy has lost a lot of its useful features. The quality of the jobs on the site has diminished rapidly - for the most part it seems to be teaching, immersive experience for parties and shopping centres, and badly paid corporate work. It was always a real gripe of mine that Mandy never monitored the rates being offered - commercial and corporate jobs will often use the site to exploit actors trying to gain a footing, by offering insultingly low rates. I'd flagged this in the past to no avail, and sadly there is even less of a chance of any user concerns being addressed - the customer service department appears to have become automated, and a community of actors have, since the takeover, offered a stream of feedback on the changes, all for the negative, with no real response offered by Mandy.

It appears to be headed in the direction of Star Now, also a subsidiary of Backstage, by which they lure early-career actors to pay to access castings that really won't do much for the majority of users' careers.

I've been with Mandy for 8 years, and I am on the verge of leaving the platform for the first time. It has always had its critics and those in the industry who have advised against it, yet I have remained an advocate throughout. Until now. I would not recommend joining - there are other emerging platforms out there - and I have no doubt that usership will drop as a result of the unconsidered changes being made, and poor customer service being offered.

Back in the day, Mandy used to be an OK free casting site with a few jobs on. Nothing special, but free. Then it bought out Actors Pro and Voices Pro and charged subscribers in the same way as APro and VPro always had done.

It advertises itself as the No1 casting website for UK Actors. It isn't. Spotlight is.

People say it must be a scam. It isn't. It's a simple P2P (pay to play) website. You pay to get access to castings just like you do (and your agent does) on Spotlight and Casting Networks.

It used to feature jobs that paid Equity rates. Now it rarely does. Pay rates are now likely to be closer to those of extras and supporting artistes.

Very occasionally you get some high budget commercial castings on there. They don't reveal who the casting director is, and often omit exact casting dates and filming dates, but you can always find these same jobs already featured on Spotlight or Casting Networks with more information. Such jobs are often for ethnic minorities, specific language skills, or specific physical skills that possibly are harder to find on Spotlight.

I don't think any high paying commercial casting job that I've ever applied for on Mandy or Actors Pro has resulted in my audition even being opened which leads me to suppose that Mandy is kind of just-in-case fallback option, an if-all-else-fails type thing.

In the main, the jobs are low pay ones either posted by students, low budget film producers or cost cutting media companies. They are genuine jobs but mostly serve only to drive performers' rates of pay down and down.

They used to have a really useful feature where they showed you when your audition had been viewed and even at what time of day (so you could even tell if the employer had looked again the same day). The time of day was then removed, but you could still tell if your profile had been viewed AND if your reel had been viewed by that employer. Then it became harder to see if your audition clip/demo had been watched or not. Finally they gave us all the chance to see how many non human bots had viewed our profile in a given time period, as if that was some kind useful tool!

It's not very expensive, and you get a discount if you're already a basic Actors Guild member, but to be frank, it really is pretty much a waste of time becoming a Premium member unless you just want to up your credits or pay some bills, or work for low rates, in which case, fine, but don't expect to hit the big time there.

I HAVE RECENTLY JOINED MANDY AFTER A REFERAL BY A FRIEND. I HAVE ENJOYED WORKING WITH MANY AND LOOK FORWARD TO DOING MORE SHOOTS. THANK YOU