EXCLUSIVE: In the second of three roundtables featuring this year’s Emmy nominees for Outstanding Casting, Deadline gathered Mary Vernieu (The Last of Us), Cathy Sandrich Gelfond (The Pitt), Rachel Tenner (Severance), Nina Gold (Slow Horses) and Meredith Tucker (The White Lotus) to talk about discovering new tricks in old talent, and finding down young actors who can look and sound like medical residents.
The nominees, who each had to submit a 30-minute composition reel from the season to showcase their work, also explained how they judge their peers and what they were most proud of accomplishing on their respective shows.
DEADLINE I’ll start with the same question that I asked the comedy casting directors. How do you go about deciding which show is more awards-worthy than another?
MEREDITH TUCKER Well, you know, I think it’s a combo of like did the people capture your attention? Are you seeing actors that you conceivably have never seen before, or are you seeing them in a completely different light? That always is super. For instance, Rachel used Robby Benson this year as Dr. Mauer. My 8-year-old heart went pitter patter. Ice Castles! It’s about doing something super interesting when you have a particular challenge. And Nina, I know it’s not in this category, and shockingly, it did not get nominated. But I thought your work in FX’s Say Nothing was brilliant. I thought it was so beautifully done.
RACHEL TENNER I agree. It’s looking at how people are used and are actualizing these parts in some kind of new way. Are there any fun, unexpected versions? Are we discovering anybody new or using people that you know we all know a certain way, and then get to re-envision them in a different way?
DEADLINE Can you talk about what you’re most proud of this season?
MARY VERNIEU I was really proud of Catherine O’Hara and Joey Pantoliano. I feel like we haven’t seen that soft side of him, and the vulnerability. It was nice to have someone who’s always played such a tough guy have a moment to do something like that so later in his career. And Catherine? I’m obsessed with her. Kaitlyn Dever is such a special actor, too. I think she’s got so much nuance in all of her performances.
DEADLINE We did hate her, though, for killing Pedro.
MARY VERNIEU Everybody hated her. Pedro, poor thing.
CATHY SANDRICH GELFOND We were really lucky on The Pitt. We had no need to cast anybody who anybody knew, and so what I got excited about, me and Erica Berger who I cast this with, is how we got to search far and wide to find new faces and kids out of training programs. It was really exciting to put this whole cast together and to find the alchemy that would work. We had a few veterans like Katherine LaNasa and Fiona Dourif, who we’ve all loved for years. Patrick Ball had an amazing audition. His parents were both longtime emergency workers. And Supriya Ganesh! We found out that Supriya had been pre-med and took the MCAT just for fun. She got like a 100 percent or a 99 percent or something.
MARY VERNIEU You’re not tied to having it be a certain name. You can actually be creative.
CATHY SANDRICH GELFOND You can really create a whole new world. I’d never done a medical show before, so I was learning a ton on top of it. I had to be careful with this ensemble. I had to find people who could react quickly on their feet because the show intercuts with all these different cases, and you have to see that people can manage the skills. We had to have the medics literally run a chair down the hall while they were saying their lines, because you would be shocked at how many people can sit in their self tape and do fine with the lines, but the minute they have to push the cart they don’t know what to do.
L to R: Cathy Sandrich Gelfond, Mary Vernieu, Meredith Tucker, Nina Gold, Rachel Tenner
NINA GOLD The writers do come up with really good new characters to add to the Slow Horses ensemble. Normally, we’ve killed a few in the season before, so we need more. It’s finding people who know the tone. The tone is so particular in this. It’s a spy drama with high stakes. It also has this tone that’s not too comedic, but is really witty and funny. It’s finding people who really can tune into that tone. The new people, probably apart from Hugo Weaving, are people who are probably not really known in America. But obviously we here in Britain have seen them in all sorts of things and watched them developing. But in America they seem like new people, which is kind of exciting.
MEREDITH TUCKER It’s obviously a challenge every year on The White Lotus. We did have Natasha Rothwell coming back, and then John Gries. It was not known at first that John Gries was coming back, and some of the relationships did sort of depend on him. I still to this day do not know how that didn’t leak. It’s astonishing to me.
RACHEL TENNER The tone of Severance is so specific, so it’s always about trying to find who’s going to make sense. We got to find a 12-year-old girl who nobody knew, this girl named Sarah Bock. And it was really fun to cast people like Sandra Bernhardt and Robby Benson. But one of the things I’m actually really proud of is that friggin’ marching band, if anyone saw the finale.
MEREDITH TUCKER So good.
CATHY SANDRICH GELFOND I mean…
RACHEL TENNER We were involved in all the background, like everything. The minutia of Severance is so intense. The composer had to write the music. Then we had to get everybody to play it, and then do the dance because it was like a drum line. Everybody had to audition, and then we had to make these boards, and then you had to pick everybody’s faces and all the instruments. It took literally two months to put that together. We worked with a guy in New York who does choreography for that kind of stuff. The little minutia stuff! Even when you see the goat room for the first time. There are all those people who are working in the mammalian department. Whether they have a line or not, it’s a lot of real detailed stuff. Sometimes when I watch it, I’m like, oh, yeah, that has an impact, even if no one speaking. So that was a lot of fun this year. But I’m gonna put in quotes. It’s fun looking at it now. Maybe it wasn’t fun in the moment.
DEADLINE What you’re seeing in terms of submissions? What’s the talent pool look like these days?
CATHY SANDRICH GELFOND There’s a lot.
RACHEL TENNER Flat out, yes. You get thousands of submissions per role. You get an endless amount of emails and pitches. I easily have, like a thousand emails just for one job. It’s not an easy job, casting. You put a lot of time and effort into it, really, looking through it all while shaping your show and your characters. You want to see the people you love, but you also try to see new people. It’s an exciting process every time, but the volume is definitely a lot.
CATHY SANDRICH GELFOND I think the volume is much bigger now. Now for one part, which is not even a series regular part, there are like 6,000 people because we have it on Breakdown Express.
NINA GOLD Sometimes it it is quite overwhelming to get one’s head around the volume of people coming at you, and have to be kind of discriminating.
DEADLINE What do you attribute the volume to?
CATHY SANDRICH GELFOND Hope springs eternal. Every actor keeps trying, because it could be that one time. And you know, on The Pitt there were a lot of people who hadn’t really done much. So that can happen. People just don’t give up.
MARY VERNIEU God loves a trier. It’s exciting when it does work out. That part of it is the best.
DEADLINE How are you feeling these days about the industry?
NINA GOLD It’s a roller coaster.
MARY VERNIEU Yes, it is.
MEREDITH TUCKER I feel better about the industry than I do about the world.
MARY VERNIEU I think the change is something we all have to sort of adapt to and transition into. And it’s not just us. But we don’t want to be stagnant, so we just have to like adapt. I don’t feel pessimistic. I feel optimistic. I mean, sometimes it’s really hard, because there are less jobs. People have a lot of stress and a lot of anxiety. Trying to make people feel safe is challenging.
RACHEL TENNER There is still a great need for content, whether it’s features or television. Like Nina said, it’s a roller coaster, because I feel like we’ve been through a more constricted time at one point, and then it kind of opened up again. Now it’s pulled back again. I just have to think that it will work out, because I don’t want to think about it any other way or I’ll give myself an anxiety attack.
CATHY SANDRICH GELFOND I also think we’ve all done this long enough to know how cyclical it is. I’m not sure we know what’s coming next, but entertainment is not going away. It may be shaped differently, but it’s not going away. I always go with the good.
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