The best app for actors has to do the whole job

I'm an actor who is good at building really good apps. Probably because I'm an actor.

Now, I could tell you that I'm also a really good actor, but that's subjective. Some have said so. My mother, sometimes. Very kind of them. None of it is verifiable in any consistent way. For example, I once played Claudio in Much Ado About Nothing. One critic said it was one of the most illuminating performances of the part they've seen and another said I exuded the charm of a dead fish. Ouch.

An app though is easier to judge.

Does it solve a real problem? Does it solve it in a way that's different or genuinely useful? And most importantly, can another human being pick it up and immediately understand what you were trying to do?

Which, when you think about it, is basically acting. You have a big idea. You need another human being to get it. Your entire job is figuring out the most evocative and effective way to make that happen.

And I have some evidence that I'm at least decent at the app part. I've taken hare-brained ideas and turned them into real products. I even went on Dragons' Den with a dating app and walked out having shaken Arlene Dickinson's hand on a deal.

So what happens when a maybe-good actor who makes really good apps finally makes an app for actors?

Well, naturally, I think I made the best app for actors ever made.

Welcome to Subtext.

So let me tell you a story. You know this one. Every actor does.

It starts with an audition.

An email from your agent

A breakdown, a few pages of sides, and a due date that is almost certainly too soon. START and END scrawled across the pages, an FYI scene you may or may not be in, and a giant watermark with your name running diagonally through the whole thing.

You drop that PDF into Subtext, watermark and all, and it reads the sides the way you would: it finds the scenes, finds the characters, and works out which of those pages are actually yours. Tap your character and every one of your lines lights up. You haven't done anything yet, and you're already further along than the highlighter would have gotten you.

Then you have to learn the thing

A lot of us have opened Voice Memos and recorded the entire scene ourselves. Their line. Pause. My line. Their line. Pause. My line. And then you sit there pressing play, pause, play, pause, and somewhere around take sixteen you start wondering: why can't the thing just run the scene with me?

So Subtext does. Every other character gets a voice, they say their line, and it listens while you say yours. Hide your lines when you're ready to get off book. Blank, and it gives you a hint, a word or two, enough to find your way back. Go back a line. Run it again. Overlap them, pick up your cue while their line is still going, because that is what actors do and no flashcard has ever let you.

Now you need a reader, and I mean a person

This is the part where I get serious for a paragraph. Never, ever send a tape with an automated voice on it. When it's time to tape, get a human. If casting hears that AI voice in the first four seconds the tape is dead. Other apps sell this as a feature. Think about that. Why would you pay for a service that costs you the job?

So Subtext gets you a real one, minus the part every actor dreads: scrolling the Rolodex of friends, working out who you haven't asked lately, the "can you FaceTime at 9:30, no 10, okay 10," the forty-five minutes that were supposed to be fifteen. You send your reader a link. They open it in their browser, no app to download, and record the other character's lines once, whenever they have a moment. From then on their real voice is opposite you, tonight, tomorrow, at two in the morning, for every rehearsal and every take. You ask once. They record once. You run it fifty times.

I'll say it plainly: this part is amazing. Think about what it saves you. The scheduling. The asking. The guilt of asking again. The night before a tape, when the person you need is asleep and the deadline isn't. All of that, gone. You get your reader and you keep your friend. My wife, for one, is thrilled.

Then you shoot it, cut it, and send it

Normally this is where the whole thing gets stupid. You open the Camera app and throw away everything you've just built. You open Final Cut to trim twelve seconds off a self-tape. At midnight you are Googling "how do I make a video file smaller," downloading HandBrake, and learning the difference between H.264 and H.265, which is knowledge no actor has ever wanted and no casting director has ever asked us to possess. Then it's still too big to email, so off you go to WeTransfer.

In Subtext you shoot the scene you were already rehearsing, with the reader you were already using, from the script you were already working from, teleprompter on if you want it, though by now you won't. Trim the takes, add a slate, put the audition together, and it comes out at the size casting actually wants. Then, instead of an attachment, you get a link. Your agent or casting opens it in a browser, it plays, they can download it. No transfer service. No extra account.

Done. Actually done.

And this is where most apps for actors stop. Plenty of them only ever did one piece of what you just did, and frankly, not that well. I know. I've used them. But everything so far was only the audition.

Because hopefully, you book it

And now those six pages are a ninety-page screenplay or a hundred-and-twenty-page play, and you're going to rehearsal. You're going to set. You are going on stage.

And Subtext comes with you. It was built for an actor all along. Your lines light up across the whole script the second you tap your name. Tabs take you straight back to the scenes you keep returning to. Highlights, underlines, a circle around a single word. And notes that don't eat the page: tap a spot, write the thought, and what stays behind is a small dot you can come back to.

Then production sends the revision. New pages, new scene numbers, and in any other app your three weeks of markings are gone. In Subtext you drop the new draft in and everything comes with you, along with a summary of what changed and, more to the point, how it affects you. Yes. More magic.

You want to hear the thing, so Subtext performs the whole script out loud, every character in their own voice, the action narrated, a table read you can carry with you while you walk the dog. You start hearing its rhythm. You notice when a character disappears for twenty pages. Your director gives you notes, and they go in organized by the day you got them, so you can work through them and tick them off one at a time, with the ones about a specific line living on that line.

And if the job is a voice gig, you record it right there, and it exports with your voice cleaned up so you sound like you were in a booth even if you were in a closet.

All of it made for us. For you, the actor.

At which point you might reasonably think: my God, why is this app so jam-packed?

Because an actor is an actor is an actor. Every step of the way.

People in tech will tell you this is the wrong way to build a product

Pick one problem, they say, and solve it beautifully. And they're right, in the sense that it would have been an easier company to run and a much easier app to explain. But the one problem I am trying to solve beautifully is the actor's job, and the actor's job was never one thing. It is read, hear, understand, mark, learn, rehearse, tape, send, and then, if you're lucky, all of it again at ten times the length in a rehearsal hall. An app that does one of those has solved an eighth of the problem and handed you back the other seven.

So I didn't build a line-learning app. Or a self-tape app. Or a script-markup app. Or a rehearsal app. I built the thing that sits underneath all of them, because that's where the actor actually is.

You get a script. You read it. You hear it. You understand it. You mark it up. You learn it. You rehearse it. You perform it.

Maybe that performance is an audition in your basement. Maybe it's eight shows a week. Maybe a director yells action, but you're still the same actor, working from the same words, trying to make them live.

An actor is an actor is an actor.

My wife asked me the other day, if you could do anything else with your life, what would it be? I paused to honor the depth of this question, but I told her the truth. "Honestly, when I'm working, there's truly nothing else I'd rather be doing with my life."

This is the truth and this is the entire purpose of Subtext: to get you, a human, more work.