Getting the right actors into the right roles in a film or television production is crucial, yet there is still no Oscar for best casting and the Baftas only introduced it as an awards category in 2020. Traditionally a female-dominated profession, the category absence could be a result of lingering sexism in the industry, even though nobody has disputed how important the casting process is. So how does it come about that this actor rather than that one ends up staring out at you from the big screen?
“The actors are carrying the can with their faces for a whole enterprise, over which they have very little control,” says the casting director Amy Rowan. Among her recent projects was the Irish film The Bright Side, released in cinemas last August, on which she admired the zen-like style of the director Ruth Meehan and how she treated the cast. “I wish people would work a little bit more like that in our business,” Rowan says. “There can be a perceived wisdom that film-making should be energised in a slightly high-octane way, and I don’t think that is necessarily true. Especially for the actors, who are in front of the camera, it’s much better when they are relaxed and nurtured.”
After a brief apprenticeship, Rowan started casting solo in 2003 and has worked on more than 70 screen productions. “My slate at the moment is two or three features that are actively casting,” she says. “But then there are also seven or eight projects that are in development that need to be shepherded along.” Sometimes Rowan gets called in very early in the process — “I can get calls from people for stuff that hasn’t been written yet because they are making a funding application and they need to put in casting ideas.”
On other occasions the work can be quite pressured. Recently she was given three weeks to cast a Hallmark feature. The American TV channel makes a movie a week, along a defined rapid production model, and occasionally films in Ireland. “We got to cast a really talented young actor called Ali Hardiman as the second lead in the Hallmark feature film,” Rowan says. “That could mean a lot for her profile.”
Rowan has done several projects with first-time feature directors. How does that work when she knows more about the actors than they do? “I always know more about the actors than my directors,” she says with a laugh. “You couldn’t put any two casting directors on the same job and get the same cast. We all go through the process slightly differently. It’s not science, it’s very subjective. I lean heavily on the script, and my whole philosophy is to serve the writing. But it is the director who interprets the writing, so it’s important to get into their groove and try to work out what they want.”
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She also cast Deadly Cuts, Rachel Carey’s debut feature, which went on general release last month. It is a high-energy comedy that features four women who work in a Dublin hair salon. “The important piece of the casting was to get the dynamic right between those four,” Rowan says. “Rachel Carey gave an incredibly clear mandate, that we have authentic Dublin accents. That’s immediately a nice kind of cut-off. And when I read the script, the only person I could see in the lead part of Stacey was Ericka Roe.”
Rowan is head of professional development at the Lir Academy for acting students and does workshops in training colleges around Ireland and abroad. She came across Roe in Bow Street Academy in Dublin and saw her in small-scale theatre shows, and she recognised someone who was “working very hard to make her mark”.
The casting director Louise Kiely launched her business in 2005. The early years were her with a camera, uploading videos of auditions in the evening to send to directors and producers. Over the years she has acquired colleagues: her company now has three other casting directors and three casting assistants. Recent work ranges from Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin (in production) to the recently released Irish language feature Arracht. She refers to her company as a “hive mind” where she and her colleagues pool intelligence about talents as they keep several projects on the go at once.
“A very large part of our job is watching actors, going to see them in shows, watching them online, on TV or film. We go into drama schools and we watch people in showcases,” Kiely says. It was when she was doing a masterclass with Lir graduates that she came across Paul Mescal, whom she cast as Connell in Normal People. “I remember meeting Paul for the first time and thinking he was terrific. But nobody gets the part just by me seeing them in a play or a showcase; they have to go through the rounds of auditions and all that stuff. It is our job to help the people who are right for the role meet the creatives, to put that coupling together. I would never use the words ‘I discovered somebody’. I didn’t discover anybody, we were lucky they were there.”
Kiely has also cast the TV adaptation of Sally Rooney’s novel Conversations with Friends, which recently wrapped filming. It centres on two young female Trinity students, Frances and Bobbi. Alison Oliver, a young Lir-trained actress from Cork, was cast as Frances. “She’s amazing,” Kiely enthuses. Sasha Lane, a more experienced American actress known for her role in American Honey, plays Bobbi. “For a part like Frances or Bobbi, it’s important we cast the net really wide,” Kiely says. “We saw hundreds and hundreds of people.”
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The RTE drama series Kin was cast under pandemic conditions, she says. “There was half a day when we had people in the room, when restrictions were lifted, but beyond that we trusted our ability and did it all online.” Yasmin Seky was cast as Nikita, gangster Eric’s girlfriend. Kiely first came across Seky when she was in a youth group in Cabra, Dublin, and made an impact on her. But by the time it came to Kin, Seky had given up performing and started work in a bank. “I got in touch with her by social media and asked her to audition because we felt she was so right for the part,” Kiely says.
Apart from Rowan and Kiely, there are several other busy companies casting Irish productions, including the longstanding London-based Hubbard Casting, and Frank Moiselle, whose mother, Nuala Moiselle, was the doyenne of Irish casting in the sparser production decades of the late 20th century. The RTE soap opera Fair City has its own casting producer and a slightly different way of working than film. The executive producer Brigie de Courcy says that when a family are being created, “we occasionally hold workshop-style auditions, where a particular actor might inspire a character for the story team, and that character is then developed with the actor in mind.”
The casting process involves not just experience and skill, but also passion. Kiely says: “When we feel we have found the right person and they get cast in the role, we take a huge amount of delight in that — it’s like a little internal high-five.” Some day it may even merit an Oscar.