“We’ve decided to go in a different direction” was the standard line Hollywood casting director Tess Sanchez delivered for more than 20 years. Post-auditions, the phrase served as a gentle letdown for actors. Then, in 2020, Sanchez found herself on the receiving end of rejection after losing her beloved job. Rather than submit to defeat, Sanchez turned career lemons into literary lemonade and began to document her many funny, outrageous, absurd and poignant experiences; a feat that has resulted in her new book of essays, “We’ve Decided to Go in a Different Direction.”
Sanchez says writing her first book in the wake of job loss was “very therapeutic. I had a lot of stuff to work out, and although when I finished I felt like it was a complete story, I did not feel like I was ready to start a new chapter. I’m still trying to figure stuff out. It’s not like I was putting a period at the end of the sentence and saying ‘I’m fixed!’ ”
For those hoping for Hollywood gossip or the naming of names, they won’t find it in Sanchez’s memoir. Rather than real names, she often applies her casting director eye to who that person would be portrayed by in a film to allow readers to imagine the scenario like a movie scene: she describes a dead-end boyfriend as looking like Topher Grace so he becomes “Topher.” And at one point, Sanchez depicts herself as Jennifer Lopez while her friends resemble Jessica Biel and Selena Gomez.
She tells The Times, “My belief is that once a casting director, always a casting director. I tend to do it in my private life too because that’s just the way my brain works. … I love to be a matchmaker, and I think of it as sort of casting somebody’s lover or boyfriend. I love setting people up.”
Her own love story wasn’t a set-up, however. Her marriage to “New Girl” and “The Neighborhood” actor Max Greenfield in 2008 and the births of their daughter Lilly and son Ozzie attracted media attention, but that’s relatively rare for the duo. Both Greenfield and Sanchez have managed to stay largely out of the spotlight. The genuine adoration between the two is a fundamental part of the book. Greenfield wrote the introduction and the book is dedicated to him. Like a prime-time rom-com, their meeting in a bar and the subsequent on-again, off-again romance is lovingly detailed early in the memoir, including their breakup, reunion, Greenfield’s rehab stint for addiction — a game changer for both — and eventual marriage.
Indeed, her husband, her parents and her career are the foundations of many stories, but “the real jumping-off place of the book is where I was let go from my job,” she explains. This seismic event took place at her home, while Greenfield pottered about in the kitchen. Sanchez was in front of her laptop where she’d been expecting a standard check-in meeting. Instead, she was fired.
“It has a sort of ripple effect on almost all of the relationships in my life, including my husband and my kids.”
As the vice president of talent and casting at the WB from 2000 to 2007, Sanchez was key in casting for “Felicity,” “Dawson’s Creek,” “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “Smallville” and “Supernatural.” She writes about her early days as a temp, watching her boss, the casting director, accurately predict that emerging talents Shia LaBeouf, Channing Tatum, Jessica Chastain and Amy Adams would be stars one day. Sanchez then worked at Fox from 2009 to 2020, serving as executive vice president of casting during the end of her time with the network. From “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” to “The Mindy Project,” she was instrumental in casting household favorites for more than a decade.
At the finale of her run at Fox, Sanchez was the longest-tenured senior programming executive and the only woman of color in a senior creative executive position. Losing the job that had defined her identity for most of her adult life was, understandably, shattering.
It takes seven chapters to lead up to the crushing event. Sanchez details the Zoom meeting in which she was unceremoniously dropped, leaving her so stunned all she could repeat was, “So this is how my story ends.”
She writes, “I can’t minimize the reality of my feelings that day or my disproportionate response. It felt like the ultimate betrayal; I believe the term is ‘blindsided.’ I was invested in my job — some might say overly invested — but I was just as deeply invested in the bonded relationships I had built there. I had worked so hard to get where I was, and I take full responsibility for my lack of work-life boundaries, but my job fulfilled me in ways I can’t overstate. If I’m being honest, much of my self-worth and identity came from that position I treasured so much.”
Post-firing, she tells The Times, she was “a different friend, a different sister, a different daughter.”
She adds, “The essence of the book is really about my journey of trying to figure out why this particular job was so defining in my life, and who am I without that job? I had to look back at my career because when it went away, I just felt so empty and that enabled me to go back to the beginning and really dig in and review how I started in the industry, which bosses were amazing and how I got here. So that’s what I break down in the book.”
Readers don’t need to have a foot in the entertainment industry to relate. Job loss, and major life events, are universal. Sanchez recalls the multiple meetings she had with publishers to pitch her memoir two years ago in the wake of mass post-pandemic job losses.
“Every single meeting, somebody there would raise their hand and say, ‘That happened to my friend’ or ‘That happened to my husband.’ It’s about the loss of a job that you really identify with and what it looks like when you lose something like that. It was really fun and meaningful to connect to these women who found it so relatable. So many women lost their jobs during the pandemic, and so many companies downsized, and many people had to pivot and find a new direction to go. Some people had a really easy time doing that, and other people, like me, did not have an easy time doing that.”
Sanchez says she remains open to future opportunities in the entertainment industry, but she is also eyeing a second book, though she doesn’t disclose details. The role of an author isn’t such a leap from that of a casting director: to convey a story, to explore the dynamics between characters and recognize an elusive chemistry between them.
“I think the gift of being a casting director is giving another human being the space to show you who they are, and to pick up on all of those really important human aspects that enable somebody to really be a good storyteller,” she says. “A casting director is hiring an actor to be the vessel for this story and there is nothing better than sitting across from somebody in a room and really getting a sense of who they are.”
The anecdotes and reflections in her debut book might not offer a complete portrait of Sanchez, but they capture a time and place when she was rising through the ranks of Hollywood, and working with big budgets and stars was her everyday life. She laments that the “heyday” of Hollywood, like her job, is a relic of the past.
She says, “Post pandemic, then the strike, then the horrible L.A. fires, the industry has really taken a beating. Hollywood had its heyday, and I was a part of that while I was coming up, and there was nothing like it. Having always been behind the scenes, doing promotion for this book is a little uncomfortable, but I’m totally open and excited to see what unfolds, whether it’s back in casting or writing another book. Writing this was such a natural process for me.”
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