‘Wicked: For Good’ Casting Director Calls Marissa Bode “A Real Find” As Roundtable Dives Into Intricacies Of Casting – Contenders Los Angeles

When asked if there was a particular role that was a challenge to cast for Jon M. Chu’s Wicked duology, the films’ casting director Bernard “Bernie” Telsey highlighted Marissa Bode as Nessarose Thropp.

In conversation at Deadline’s Contenders Film: Los Angeles, Telsey, who has worked on the stage version of Wicked for the past 20-plus years, stressed how Nessarose had never been played by an actress who uses a wheelchair.

“That was something that was so important to Jon Chu and Mark Platt that we really did a search, just to find someone who was a wheelchair user, who is ‘tragically beautiful,’ as they say in the script, who can sing and who can carry the distance from the first film to the second film,” he said. “And it was also wonderful for us, because we got to meet so many new actors who, you know, who could,…