Entertainment Weekly‘s Bold School stars know that bombing an audition is never the end of the world.
During EW’s Comic-Con panel Saturday, moderated by Senior Writer Maureen Lee Lenker, NCIS: Tony & Ziva star Cote de Pablo and M3GAN 2.0 star Violet McGraw revealed their worst audition stories and the resulting advice they received that stuck with them ever since.
“I remember, it was an audition for a musical called Fame,” de Pablo said. “I was standing right outside and I had all of my [lines memorized]. I was like, ‘I’m so ready.’ And I made this stupid rookie mistake of standing right outside the door.”
She continued, “Oh my God, somebody in there just was singing like you can’t believe! The sound of this woman, they were incredible. They were incredible! And I was about to go on and I just went [makes sad trombone noise].”
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Violet McGraw at EW’s Bold School panel at Comic-Con 2025
De Pablo revealed that when it was her turn to audition, she could barely perform the song.
“It does not happen often to me because I love a stage,” de Pablo said. “‘I walked out of that just completely defeated.”
The NCIS star called up a very good friend immediately after to commiserate.
“I said, ‘I need you to pick me up… I’ve detonated. I think there’s an arm on 43rd, there’s a leg on 47th. I think you could pick up my torso somewhere else,'” she said. “My self-esteem had just gone [poof]. And he was like, ‘Cote, it’s just an audition.’ And I was like, ‘You’re right.’ But to this day, I still laugh every single time I hear that song, I just go, ‘Oh my God!’ It just brings me back to that moment.”
McGraw had a similar — yet wildly different — tale to tell of her worst audition. The M3GAN star recalled when she was 4 years old and auditioned for a commercial with her younger brother that turned into a nightmare situation.
“I’m in the room, and I have a lot of lines, and I don’t say anything,” McGraw explained. “I’m just standing there, and I look stupid. We leave the casting office with my mom, and the casting director runs after us and tells my mom, ‘She didn’t seem like how she did in her self-tape, is she okay? She’s like bouncing back and forth, does she have to go to the bathroom?'”
McGraw remembered her mother asking before the audition if she needed to go to the bathroom, and she had said no at the time.
“So my mom’s like, ‘Okay, I’ll take her to the bathroom and see,'” McGraw said. “So we go to the bathroom and my mom’s like, ‘Sweetie, go to the bathroom.’ I don’t say anything but tears just start streaming down my face — because I already went to the bathroom in the auditioning room.”
As the Hall H crowd went, “Awww,” McGraw laughed and quipped, “Which was great!”
She added, “My mom’s like, ‘No, it’s okay. It’s okay to make mistakes.’ And my brother was just being so supportive, he was like, ‘Violet, no, your pants are dark. No one’s going to notice this.'”
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But it turned out that peeing her pants wasn’t a dealbreaker for that audition.
“I went back into the room, and I booked it,” McGraw revealed. Talk about a happy ending.
EW’s Bold School panel also featured Taylour Paige (The Toxic Avenger), Madeleine McGraw (The Black Phone 2), and Harriet Slater (Outlander: Blood Of My Blood).
Check out more of EW’s coverage from San Diego Comic-Con 2025.
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