As in years past, this Emmy season gives the IndieWire Craft team the chance to reach out to nominated casting directors to ask them about the often misunderstood art of casting. As “Adolescence” casting director Shaheen Baig told IndieWire in our recent Craft Considerations for the Netflix limited series, “ It’s not the case that a casting director opens a book or opens IMDB and goes, ‘Yeah, it’s these five people. This does the job,’ and it’s the same five people you see in everything. There is a craft. There’s a lot of time and effort and conversation and debate that goes into it.”
So we went out to Emmy-nominated casting directors, asking them to highlight the effort and the craft that’s visible to them in their peers’ work. Each participating casting director chose a show with casting they admire, and explained why each member of the ensemble contributes to the success of the series, what makes casting difficult, and what choices were brave, bold swings that paid off in spades.
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What’s notable about the shows listed below is how often casting directors were able to find performers who could reveal new sides of themselves and flex different muscles from the roles they’ve done before. It now seems impossible to imagine anyone other than Jenny Slate as Nikki in “Dying For Sex,” Olafur Darri Olafsson as Mr. Drummond in “Severance,” or Ashley Walters as Detective Bascombe in “Adolescence.” But multiple casting directors pointed out how those choices were unconventional. It always requires a very specific alchemy and real creative thinking, in order to create a series where, as “Severance” casting director Rachel Tenner told IndieWire, “every member of the ensemble feels essential.”
Each casting director was able to spotlight something these shows do well, whether it’s building an ensemble, running a wide and unconventional search for leads, finding pitch-perfect guest stars, or bringing performers to a project in such a way that their combination gives us a true sense of the series’ world. Casting director Tiffany Little Canfield, who does all of that for earned comedic impact on “Only Murders in the Building,” pointed out the ways that even a long-running reality series can completely change its game by casting the right combination of people. Read on to find out why.
Series are listed in alphabetical order by title.
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