<\/p>\n
“Are you kidding?”<\/p>\n
That was casting director Susanne Scheel’<\/strong>s immediate answer when she was first asked if she wanted to meet Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow <\/strong>about working on her then-upcoming film, A House of Dynamite<\/em>.<\/p>\n More from Gold Derby<\/strong><\/p>\n A series of Zooms led to an in-person meeting and eventually a job offer \u2014 and then the hard work began. The film calls for a wide-ranging ensemble with no leads asked to perform their roles over three intertwining acts. \u201cIt took me a minute to wrap my head around it,\u201d Scheel admits.<\/p>\n But then she found what she calls a \u201cbeautiful\u201d way in. \u201cI started really thinking of it as five or six short films that each had to function on their own,\u201d she says. \u201cThe biggest challenge for me was you couldn’t let the audience get confused about who was who for even a second given the pace of the film. So we started with the pillars.\u201d Those \u201cpillars\u201d were the key roles that would eventually be played by Idris Elba <\/strong>(the unnamed POTUS), Rebecca Ferguson<\/strong> (Situation Room station chief Olivia Walker), Tracy Letts <\/strong>(STRATCOM\u2019s General Brady), Jared<\/strong> Harris<\/strong> (Defense Secretary Reid Baker), and Anthony Ramos<\/strong> (Fort Greely\u2019s Major Gonzalez).<\/p>\n From there, it was a matter of figuring out who sits next to them, and then who sits next to them and so on. \u201cBecause there were so many roles, I just had the absolute delight of bringing in actors I adored and loved, and felt like they sit beautifully into this world,\u201d Scheel says. \u201cAnd then we\u2019d look at them in groups, and say, OK this person really would work well with this person, or who would be best to be that person who\u2019s in the chopper sitting next to Idris. It was just beyond a dream.\u201d<\/p>\n