Casting Secrets – London Contenders
As the 98th Academy Awards approach, it seems strange that, nearly 100 years later, the Academy is now presenting an award to honor the work of casting directors. On Deadline’s Contenders London, casting veteran Des Hamilton made the audience laugh when he revealed that while visiting an American colleague with big trophies, he seriously thought the man had gone out and bought them himself. “It’s great that this year the Academy thinks the job deserves recognition alongside all the other department heads.”
In Deadline’s first-ever casting panel, Hamilton appeared alongside Nia DCosta’s co-star, Jo Harris. calm, After the HunT jessica ronan, and F1Lucy Bevan and Emily Brockman. First up was Bevan, who spoke about their work F1Which began with the role of the brilliant young man Joshua Pierce. “Brad was already on board,” she said. “We read the scripts and saw that this role was going to be a huge undertaking for a young actor, to go toe-to-toe with Brad and play that character and also have to lead. So it was a huge challenge. We auditioned and auditioned, and Damson [Idris] Brilliantly done. For its final test, we took it to the race track to make sure it could handle the driving. Being the smart and brilliant young actor he is, he has done a lot of training. So he was ready and got the role. He did a great job.”
“Every project is different,” Brockman added. “You end up becoming an expert, moving into a community that you don’t always know a lot about. I knew a little about Formula 1, but in the end, I had to really understand the world. If you do your research, you can cast actors who can easily blend into that world. You have to have people who have the real look of being on a racetrack.”
Harris raised a similar point about casting challenges calm. “It all happened in one night,” she said. “We needed to find roles of different sizes, but everyone was needed to film all the time. So it was just a matter of getting that group together and finding people that Nia could really see in this world. It was a completely unique job, where the characters were very heightened but they also needed to feel completely real. So, we needed people who could bring some crazy energy to it but also have some kind of emotional truth. That was exciting Really interesting for us.”