As the Oscars approach their 98th iteration, it seems strange that after nearly 100 years the Academy is only now bringing in an award to honor the work of casting directors. At Deadline’s Contenders London, casting veteran Des Hamilton made the audience laugh when he revealed that, while visiting an American colleague with a shelf’s worth of awards, he seriously thought the guy must have gone out and bought them himself. “It’s wonderful that this year the Academy thinks the job is worthy of recognition alongside all the other heads of department.”
At Deadline’s first-ever casting panel, Hamilton appeared alongside Jo Harris, his colleague on Nia DCosta’s Hedda, After the Hunt’s Jessica Ronane, and F1’s Lucy Bevan and Emily Brockmann. First up was Bevan, who talked about their work on F1, which began with the role of young hotshot Joshua Pearce. “Brad was already on board,” she said. “We read the scripts and saw that this role would a huge undertaking for a young actor, to go toe to toe with Brad and play the arc of that character and also have to drive. So it was a big challenge. We auditioned and auditioned, and Damson [Idris] did brilliantly. For his final audition, we took him to the race track to make sure he could handle the driving. Being the smart, brilliant, young actor that he is, he’d done loads of practice. So he was ready and he got the part. He did brilliantly.”
“Each project’s different,” added Brockmann. “You end up becoming an expert, going into a community that you don’t necessarily always know much about. I knew a little bit about Formula One, but by the end, I really got to understand the world. If you’ve done your research, you can cast actors who can seamlessly fit into that world. You have to have people who’ve got that authentic look of being on the racetrack.”
Harris made a similar point about the challenges of casting Hedda. “It all takes place over one night,” she said. “We needed to find roles of varying sizes, but everyone was needed for the shoot for that whole time. So it was just a question of bringing together that group and finding people that Nia really could see in that world. It was quite a unique job, in that the characters are very heightened but they also needed to feel quite real. So, we needed people that could bring some kind mad energy to it but also had a kind of emotional truth. That was really interesting for us.”
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