Jack Thorne gave casting directors Nina Gold and Martin Ware a tall order. The Emmy-winning co-creator of “Adolescence” had adapted William Golding’s seminal 1954 novel “Lord of the Flies” into a four-episode Netflix series, and he needed approximately 30 boys, no younger than 5 years old and no older than 12, to anchor four hours of television that are almost entirely adultfree. Oh, and they’d be shooting primarily in mangrove forests in Malaysia for three months.
So what was running through the casting directors’ heads when they got the job? “Wild panic,” Gold said with a laugh.
“Having to find over 30 amazing young actors to send out there when you’re (more used to) casting a couple of kid roles in a film or TV, that’s a pretty massive undertaking,” Ware added. “I don’t think we’d ever done anything quite like it before.”
The duo previously collaborated on several films and television shows such as “Conclave,” “Andor” and “Baby Reindeer,” which won them an Emmy in 2024. Earlier this year, Gold was part of the inaugural class of nominees for the best casting Oscar, for “Hamnet,” which featured another demanding child role for then-12-year-old Jacobi Jupe.
But Jupe worked with an adult cast, including Oscar winner Jessie Buckley. The “Lord of the Flies” kids, for the most part, did not.
“It really was immense, and also a story where they have to hold 99% of the narrative and keep you wanting to watch without ever cutting to the famous superstar actor,” Gold said.
She and Ware started their search in September 2023, 11 months before production began. They had all four of Thorne’s scripts — an “unusual” luxury for casting directors, according to Gold — and cast a wide net to more than 100 schools in the U.K. and Ireland. They also put out a call on social media, asking children to send in videos introducing themselves and sharing whom or what they’d like to be stranded on a tropical island with.
“It was a great way to straightaway start to know their personalities, and even at that early stage start to feel out might they be more of a Jack or more of a Simon,” Ware said, referring to the story’s savage bully and kindhearted loner, respectively. “After that, we would ask everybody to read the same short scene, about a page, and then send that to us. From there, we started bringing boys into the room to meet us and work on longer pieces. That was all before we’d shown any of the producers or the director [Marc Munden] any boys. This was all just our own personal workings.”
“We were very, very, extremely thorough,” Gold said.
From the 7,000-odd kids the casting department saw, Gold and Ware narrowed the pool down to about 100 boys, using improvisation and theater games to get a feel for their talents. That helped them understand which ones had the fortitude to make it through the demanding shoot.
“This group would be together in quite an usual setup for a long time,” Gold said. “We did have a lot of very serious come-to-Jesus moments with the parents: ‘This is what you’re letting yourself and your kid in for. Think about it now before you take any further steps.’”
In the end, they settled on a main cast of Lox Pratt as Jack, Ike Talbut as Simon, Winston Sawyers as sensible group leader Ralph and David McKenna as bookish Piggy. “Lord of the Flies” marked the screen debut for Pratt, Talbut and McKenna.
“At the beginning, we were completely open-minded about who we were looking at,” Ware said. “We looked at kids who had done stuff before, and we looked at a lot more kids who hadn’t. It just so happened as we went through the process that kids who didn’t already have lots of camera skills or fixed ways of doing things just seemed to be the better fit for these enormous characters that have to go on these massive journeys.”
This story first ran in the Limited Series/TV Movie issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
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