Freya Tingley
Head coach
Working screen actor. Credits include Netflix productions and on-set work alongside Jean-Claude Van Damme, Bill Skarsgard, and Clint Eastwood.
IMDB → About · the United States
Tingley's Acting Studio
Working actors teaching actors. Head coach Freya Tingley. Credits include Netflix and sets shared with Jean-Claude Van Damme, Bill Skarsgard, and Clint Eastwood. Coaching sessions in the United States run on PT / MT / CT / ET (plus Alaska and Hawaii).
Video coming soon. Studio introduction, how coaching here runs.
Tingley's is a coaching practice run by working screen actors. Our coaches are not retired teachers or adjacent professionals. They are people whose days, between sessions with students, are spent on sets, in audition rooms, and on the professional side of the industry students are trying to enter. Head coach Freya Tingley brings credits across Netflix productions and on-set work alongside Jean-Claude Van Damme, Bill Skarsgard, and Clint Eastwood. The wider team has worked across feature film, episodic television, commercial production, and theatre. We coach one-to-one, in person and remotely, in standalone sessions and short intensives.
Coaches and acting teachers
Every coach at Tingley's is a currently working actor. You learn from people who are still in the rooms you are trying to enter.
Tom Rainn
Coach and working actor
Working screen and voice actor. Trained at RADA. Credits include voicing Sto-Oa alongside James McAvoy on Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman: Act V for Audible, and starring in the award-winning short Long Black.
IMDB →
Nick Pinelli
Coach and working actor
Working screen and stage actor with fifteen years in the industry. Theatre-trained. Credits include the award-winning films If I Could Ride Again (Apple TV, Hulu), Write On, and Boss Battle, plus international stage work including Mom and Dad.
IMDB →
Rachel Gallagher
Coach and working actor
Atlanta-based screen, stage, and voice actor. Trained at Chapman University. Credits include Homicide Hunter: Justice Served (Discovery ID), Heaux & Tell on Keke Palmer’s KeyTV Network, and lead roles in Steel Magnolias and Puffs at The Straz Center.
IMDB →The Tingley Acting Method
Craft
The work is the work. Every session is practical. We run scenes, we mark up sides, we put the camera on you and we play the tape back. I do not teach theory without application. The craft you leave with should be craft you can use in a room the same week.
Practice
A career in acting is a long practice of small improvements. Most of my students book work not because they had one transformative session, but because they came back every fortnight for a year and kept sharpening the same edges. I design coaching plans with that long arc in mind.
Honesty
I will tell you what I see. If a choice is not landing, I will say so, and we will find one that does. If a role is outside your current castable range, I will say so, and we will work toward it or work around it. Acting is hard enough without a coach who flatters you.
Training and ongoing practice
Head coach Freya Tingley trained as an actor between 2010 and 2013 and has worked professionally since. She holds SAG-AFTRA membership and coaches across eight performed accents: American Standard, English, Australian, Irish, Scottish, Cockney, Welsh, and Russian.
Every coach on the team maintains their own working practice alongside teaching. That is the condition we hire on. Nobody coaches at Tingley's who is not also auditioning, booking, and shooting as an actor themselves, because the craft we teach is the craft we are using this week, not the craft we used to use.
In the United States, every coach working with minors holds a current a background check appropriate to the state (often a LiveScan fingerprint check and a child-abuse registry screening), issued by the applicant’s state Department of Justice or equivalent, together with the FBI for federal records. Documentation is sighted before the first session with a minor.
Why I coach
I started coaching because the young actors I met on set were often getting their first real coaching from the person directing them, which is too late. The industry does not build training into its own pipeline in any systematic way. You have to find it. I wanted to be one of the coaches who is easy to find and who knows what an audition actually looks like this year, not ten years ago.
I started acting at fourteen. Most of what I learned in those first five years, I learned by getting it wrong in a room with a casting director watching and nobody afterwards to tell me why. Nobody explained which takes were the right takes, or when a safe choice was costing me the job, or how to hold a read under pressure without making it smaller. What I coach now is the coaching I needed then. If it had existed, I would have booked sooner, stayed in the room longer, and spent less of my early career guessing.
How my work connects to the the United States industry
The actors I coach in the United States are working into a market with its own conventions: Actors Access, Casting Networks, Backstage as the primary submission platforms, SAG-AFTRA (Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists) as the actors' union, and a production base across Los Angeles, New York City, and Atlanta as the three largest markets, with Chicago, Albuquerque, and New Orleans as rapidly growing secondary markets on the back of state tax incentives.
I keep current with those conventions because the actors I coach are submitting through them this week. The craft notes are the same in any country. The platform expectations, the slate format, the union floor, and the working schedule on a the United States-based set are not. We work to both layers in every session.
Coaching formats
One-to-one, in person
Select the United States cities on tour. Check availability when booking.
One-to-one, remote
Video session on PT / MT / CT / ET (plus Alaska and Hawaii). Available anywhere in the United States.
Audition prep intensives
A 90-minute focused session for a specific audition. Usually booked within 48 hours of sides landing.
Block bookings
Packages of eight or ten sessions at a lower per-session rate. For actors committing to ongoing scene study or accent work.
Book a 15-minute introductory call
Free, to discuss your goals and whether coaching is a fit. PT / MT / CT / ET (plus Alaska and Hawaii).