When casting director Shayna Markowitz got the call to join Bradley Cooper‘s latest directorial effort, Is This Thing On?, she knew that one of the film’s unique challenges would be to find the right actors for the smaller roles that support stars Will Arnett and Laura Dern, particularly when it came to populating the comedy club scenes, where Arnett’s character starts doing stand-up to process his pending divorce.
“Bradley wanted to cast comics that were not recognizable,” says Markowitz, who previously worked with Cooper in casting Maestro. “We really wanted to surround Will Arnett’s character with comics that felt up and coming, that you would see at open mic nights. So we approached that by researching not the top comedy clubs, but all the other comedy clubs in New York and who was performing there and watching tons and tons of footage.”
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Markowitz then had the comics audition with a few minutes of material and had them read lines. “Being a stand-up is very specific and we couldn’t have people fake that part,” she says. “Great improvisational actors don’t necessarily have the stand-up muscle, so we needed to make sure that they could act and they could improv. And then we were populating the open mic nights at the Comedy Cellar, so for those actors, we worked closely with the manager there, Liz Furiati. who helped make sure that the actors that we were casting for the hosts and the comics that are hanging out there were authentic to who would be performing at the Cellar on those nights.”
Gold Derby spoke with Markowitz for a “Meet the Experts: Spotlight” panel about the fun of re-teaming with Cooper, how she and her team also found the perfect young actors to play Arnett and Dern’s kids, as well as
Gold Derby: What have you enjoyed about getting to work with Cooper again and how do you feel about his evolution as a filmmaker?
Shayna Markowitz: I feel so lucky to work with Bradley Cooper and to work with him a second time because the trust and the shorthand is just there. It’s already built in. We are already speaking similar language. Obviously his movie is a completely different organism than the last one, but the way that we communicate, the way that I show him auditions, the way that we talk about roles, knowing how open he is, knowing if he wants to see actors or meet them and how he will work with them on set, really helped to just let me put my head down and do my work and then collaborate with him and have a great time.
Are there any kind of secret actor assassins that you brought into the cast? I think you had mentioned Christine Ebersole, you and Bradley both kind of landed on together?
Markowitz: Sure, I mean, I feel so lucky that Christine Ebersole is a part of our movie and Ciarán Hinds as well, play Will’s parents. That was amazing. Christine is such a wonderful actress, but also sort of a comedy darling, having done SNL and theater, she’s a real New York staple. So to have her comedy underscore that role, even though it’s not one of the comics in the movie, she’s delicious in the movie. And Ciarán too, sometimes when we are casting actors, they come and they do it exactly as you imagined and they bring it to life in that way. And then other times casting an actor can really inform you about the role. And I think Ciarán helped to clarify who the Jan character was to Arnett’s Alex and who Alex was to Jan. I was so happy that they were on board and many others. I’m so proud of them.
One other incredible asset are your young actors in this movie. What is your strategy to casting kids or your favorite part about working with younger actors?
Markowitz: It varies project to project, but in this one, we were looking for actors who just felt like kids, who did not feel like actors. That can be hard because sometimes someone is a kid and then you put a camera in front of them and then they are uncomfortable or awkward. So first, we’re just looking for actors who felt like kids, who brought an essence to them that was Will and Laura Dern-like, so that we believed that they were their children. And then we had to match them with one another because we were building a family. So not only did they have to feel like Laura and Will’s sons, but they also had to relate to one another as brothers. And because they’re Irish twins, essentially the same age, we had to look at size and height. And so it was a big soup that we sort of deduced and distilled until we got our boys. We did chemistry reads to see who had nice chemistry as brothers and then towards the end of the process we had the boys read with Will.
How did you go about casting that end sequence with the kids in the school?
Markowitz: That part of the script sort of evolved as we were in preproduction and Bradley shot that part of the movie at a school in New York City. Our department was connected with the music teacher there and with him, we worked together to see what actors and singers and students there sort of fit the age range and had the musical and singing abilities that we were looking for. And then we auditioned them like we would anybody and that’s how they ultimately ended up in the movie.
This article and video are presented by Searchlight.
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