One of the highest compliments that you can pay to an actor is to insist that they made a role their own; the great performances are those where it’s impossible to imagine anybody else in the part. This year’s crop of Oscar nominees offers plenty such singularities, whether it’s Rose Byrne blistering her way through the maternal pathos play of If I Had Legs I’d Kick You or Delroy Lindo pounding out a melancholy rhythm in memory of a friend in Sinners. Ethan Hawke disappears like an escape artist into his role as a lovelorn lyricist in Blue Moon; Amy Madigan makes Weapons her own with a wave and a smile.
The superlatives reserved for these actors are well earned. But the art of the casting director, which pivots on recognizing the potential alchemy between a role and a performer, is arguably even more mysterious. It’s also overdue for institutional recognition. Cue the creation of the Academy’s new Best Casting category, which seeks to expand and deepen appreciation for a skill set located at the intersection of industry savvy, imaginative projection, and divination. The first batch of nominees line up nicely—although perhaps a bit too snugly—with the Best Picture front-runners: Jennifer Venditti (Marty Supreme), Nina Gold (Hamnet), Cassandra Kulukundis (One Battle After Another), Francine Maisler (Sinners), and Gabriel Domingues (The Secret Agent).
Figuring out how to best deploy—and exploit—stars and seeking out fresh talent have always been essential components of American filmmaking. But, as critic Michael Schulman observed recently in The New Yorker, for the first few decades of Hollywood history, the process was “more clerical than creative,” owing to the assembly-line nature of so much studio production. When film scholar Thomas Schatz devised the phrase “the genius of the system” to describe an era defined by risk management and vertical integration, he drew a bead on the top-down, compartmentalized philosophy that kept actors bound tightly to studio contracts, carefully controlled by publicity departments and discouraged from straying beyond their perceived comfort zones. Moguls had the final say on casting: when David O. Selznick conducted a search for an actress to play Scarlett O’Hara in the film adaptation of Gone With the Wind, it was part fairy tale, part publicity stunt. The emphasis was on the producer’s power for putting a beautiful face to one of the most famous names in American literature. Meanwhile, Vivien Leigh’s assertion, made before she won the role, that “I’ve cast myself as Scarlett O’Hara” goes down in history as one of the greatest examples of a star calling her shot.
Leigh, of course, was iconic in Gone with the Wind, one of the great pieces of a-star-is-born casting, regardless of the backstory. Selznick also guessed right by thrusting the relatively unknown Joan Fontaine into Rebecca, paired with the virtuoso Shakespearean star Sir Laurence Olivier. Ever the master manipulator, Alfred Hitchcock used the disparity in stature between the two actors to pressurize a narrative about a modest young woman marrying a tall, dark, and handsome mystery man; Fontaine’s attempt to hold her own against a legitimate icon added layers of anxiety to the proceedings
Hitchcock’s knack for actively deconstructing his performers—especially when he had them play against type, like enlisting Jimmy Stewart to play a series of perverts—proved that a great filmmaker didn’t have to care about, or even like, actors (Hitchcock likened them to “cattle”) in order to get the most out of them Meanwhile, a director like Elia Kazan cultivated a reputation as the patron saint of Method-ical acting prodigies; by porting over Marlon Brando from his stage production of A Streetcar Named Desire—and pitting him against Leigh, who duly played Blanche Dubois like Scarlett O’Hara gone to seed—he hotwired Tennessee Williams’s greatest play into a showcase for generationally divergent acting styles.
Things began to change in the 1960s, when shifts in the industry loosened studio control over every aspect of filmmaking. The gradual erosion of exclusive, expensive, multi-picture actor contracts, combined with the rise of high-end television production and a commercially viable American independent cinema—dual pipelines for unconventional stars—helped to demolish existing orthodoxies around casting. In 1968, Norman Jewison’s heist thriller The Thomas Crown Affair became the first movie to ever feature a separate title card for its casting director, Lynn Stalmaster, who had lucked out in that case; supposedly, the part of the master thief played by Steve McQueen had been originally offered to Johnny Carson.
Stalmaster was an early advocate for John Travolta and Jeff Bridges; he lobbied for Christopher Reeve to play Superman after seeing him in a play with Katharine Hepburn. (Richard Donner thought Reeve was too skinny). Tom Donahue’s enjoyable 2013 documentary Casting By name-checks Stalmaster while focusing more closely on his contemporary Marion Dougherty, another pioneering casting director who helped to seek out and shape the icons of the New Hollywood. The latter’s meticulous and withering index cards were the stuff of legend: Sizing up Gene Hackman in 1962, she wrote “good type – his reading was nothing but I believe he could be v. good – esp. as a gentle, big dumb nice guy.” Dougherty also found Paul Rudd and Naomi Watts toward the end of her career
In the 1990s, a number of stars pushed, unsuccessfully, for the Academy to give Dougherty an honorary Oscar; she died in 2011 before the proposal could be realized. A few years later, in 2016, Stalmaster—at that point pushing 90—was selected to receive his own lifetime achievement award. “‘Open’ is one of my favorite words,” he said in his emotional acceptance speech. “Because as I’ve said many times, you never know where or when you will find the answer [to casting a part]. And I’ve found the answer in some very strange places.”
That sense of spontaneity—of vivid presences around the edges of the action—is one common denominator between this year’s nominees. With the exception of Hamnet, they’ve all tried to integrate non-professionals into the mix. “We’re always trying to create this alchemy of these incredible actors who know where scenes are going and then these wild people who can add the texture and mystery of they don’t know where the scene’s going,” Venditti explained in an interview with The Guardian. Marty Supreme surely takes the prize for eclecticism this year: Isaac Mizrahi, Pico Iyer, and Tracy McGrady walk into a bar. And for all that Timothée Chalamet’s awards campaign shtick has pushed the idea of Josh Safdie’s ’50s picaresque as a one-man show, the sheer density of strange, implacable supporting players for him to bounce off like a ping-pong ball accounts for much of the movie’s energy.
There’s something poetic in the way Sinners literally doubles up on Michael B. Jordan’s star power while essentially placing the movie on the shoulders of musician Miles Caton, who’d never acted before H.E.R. put him on Maisler and Ryan Coogler’s radar. For Hamnet, Gold and Chloé Zhao scored a coup by reverse-engineering Noah Jupe’s appearance as Hamlet in the climactic play-within-the-film after casting his lesser known 11-year-old brother Jacobi in the title role. Meanwhile, the genuinely nerve-shredding tension of James Raterman’s performance as Sean Penn’s relentless second-in-command in One Battle After Another derives from his former gig with the Department of Homeland Security Investigations. (For all the hand-wringing over noted asshole Kevin O’Leary’s appearance in Marty Supreme, Raterman’s participation in OBAA is arguably more uncomfortable—for better or for worse, he’s a genuinely menacing screen presence.)
As it’s panned out in the Best Picture race, the smart money for Best Casting is on either Sinners or One Battle After Another; leaving aside the latter’s spot-on, slyly satirical usage of Leonardo DiCaprio as a dilapidated Girl Dad, Kulukundis’s eight-year odyssey to find an actress to play Willa Ferguson should put her over the top. “There were a lot of boxes that needed to be checked, [and] Chase [Infiniti] did them all,” she explained to Curzon. Elsewhere in the interview, Kulukundis—who has been working with Paul Thomas Anderson since 1999—slyly invokes Mulholland Drive, the greatest horror movie ever made about the casting process, to make her point: “I took [Chase] to a gym and got her to beat the living crap out of a bag to show Paul that she could be a killer, because she’s also so quiet and sweet and kind. She didn’t blink, ever. This was the girl.”
The most unlikely winner may be the most deserving, though. Of all the things that make The Secret Agent such a transporting experience, the uncanny time-machine quality of Domingues’s casting suggests the highest degree of difficulty. In Hamnet, Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley can’t help but feel contemporary despite the 16th century setting; one reason Wagner Moura—a legit dark horse for Best Actor after copping a prize at Cannes—blends into The Secret Agent’s period backdrop is because he’s surrounded by actors who, to borrow a phrase, look like they’ve never seen a smartphone. “Kleber [Mendonça Filho] was very interested in giving the movie the feeling and the spirit of the ’70s [in Brazil], like with the rebel spirit, the dirtiness, the imperfection … the strangeness of the ’70s as a tone,” Domingues said in an interview with Backstage. “I had to understand that spirit.” Yet the film’s ace in the hole is 79-year-old Tânia Maria de Medeiros Filha, who’s hilariously ornery as the left-wing hotel proprietress Mrs. Sebastiana; after earning a walk-on role as an extra in Filho’s previous (and excellent) Bacurau, she made enough of an impression to warrant an expanded part in The Secret Agent. “The thing people told me while I was in the U.S. was, ‘I love the casting because some of the characters are so imperfect,’” Domingues noted to The Hollywood Reporter. “Nowadays, [everyone’s] trying to become more perfect. We tried to cast people who would create this human landscape of people who seem real.”
Using the Oscars to genuinely measure quality is a mug’s game, of course, but any time a major awards body introduces a new prize, there’s something at stake in terms of who wins. Think of all the movies since 2021 that have tried to craft Cheer Worthy Moments (™) in the style of “Flash Enters the Speed Force.” In all seriousness, though, the best-case scenario for the Best Casting Oscar is that it doesn’t just become a corollary to Best Picture—it’d be nice to see acknowledgement of casting choices beyond the prestige-picture margins. For instance: Was there a better combination of actor and role last year than Ralph Fiennes as the iodine-slathered Dr. Kelson in 28 Years Later (or, with respect to my dead homie Hamnet, a better child performance than Alfie Williams)? Byrne’s brilliance in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You doesn’t exist in a vacuum (or a weird ceiling vortex); like in Marty Supreme, the appeal also lies in the weirdness of the surrounding players (A$AP Rocky, Conan O’Brien, and the best use of Christian Slater since Archer). How about the assemblage of Criterion Closet doppelgängers in Nouvelle Vague? Did any movie last year get better mileage out of its actors than The Naked Gun? The CCH Pounder bit alone is worth a nomination. The best indicator that the category is built to last would be if it makes room for surprises, so I’m making my long-shot call for 2027: Jason Momoa, Roman Reigns, Eric Andre, 50 Cent, Kyle Mooney … the winner is, Street Fighter.
Adam Nayman
Adam Nayman is a film critic, teacher, and author based in Toronto; his book ‘The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together’ is available now from Abrams.First Appeared on
Source link
Leave feedback about this