Best Practices for Casting Directors

To cast the historic series Pose, casting director Alexa L. Fogel held a nationwide search that took nearly six months. For Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story remake, Cindy Tolan led an eighteen month search and saw more than 30,000 actors, including three separate casting calls in Puerto Rico. Francine Maisler cast one of Dune’s characters after seeing his Tiny Desk Concert.

As our industry’s culture shifts to become more inclusive, outreach to find talent needs to expand beyond traditional boundaries, and budgets. Audiences are reticent to accept the excuse that production ‘couldn’t find anyone’ of a particular identity that is core to the authentic casting of a role.

Writers and directors have also used their platforms to amplify calls to discover diverse new talent. Showrunner Mindy Kaling put out an open casting call for three central roles her Netflix series Never Have I Ever on her Instagram. Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, a first time actor, eventually beat out over 15,000 girls for the lead role. America Ferrera recently took to Instagram to post a casting call for her feature film adaptation of the novel I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, and reportedly the volume of responses crashed the casting directors email account.

When casting for emerging talent, or outreaching to communities that have been historically excluded from these processes, it’s important to consider how you and your team are creating an environment that is safe, accommodating and welcoming. Best practices for accessibility, diverse gender inclusion, and health and safety should all be employed throughout the casting process to the same degree as during production.

When casting for a role that could be played by an actor of any race/ethnicity, disability, age, or gender/gender identity, make it clear in your casting notice that you want to see actors of all these backgrounds. List them out specifically so that individuals can be sure you are talking about them. For example, when you’re casting roles that are not gender-specific, list something like, “all genders” or “any gender identity” instead of “male” or “female.”