A M.

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.