Something For Actors

What casting a feature is like, from our perspective.

A lot of actors read this newsletter, and I’ve been requested to talk a bit more about the acting side of the business, and this week seems very appropriate for that.

This week, we started working on casting a few roles for our upcoming debut feature. I’m very fortunate - my background is in acting, so when it comes to directing, it’s relatively easy to find incredible actors, as I’ve worked with so many incredible such people in and after acting school. Most of the roles for this feature were cast that way - I know a person who’s perfect for the character, or I even wrote the role with them in mind to begin with, I send them the script, hopefully it clicks, and voilà.

But of course, a feature has a lot of characters, so we couldn’t cast everyone this way, so we went on Spotlight. Myself and the producers got casting professionals’ credits, which was awesome because we got an insight what that side of things is like on Spotlight, and put out a casting call for three roles.

Three roles. All three of them not particularly big roles, not special extras or anything, but one-two-three sceners. Good roles, but not leads or supporting.

Last time we outsourced actors was through a social media call (which went lowkey viral) and it was for two leads in a short film. Received around 950 submissions, and I thought it was because it was an open call, and also on Instagram & Facebook, so more people would have seen it. I thought, when working with agents, surely you don’t get that many submissions.

Technically, I was right, because we received a total of 901 submissions this time, which is less, but still an insane number of actors to look through. For three small parts, arguably smaller than the parts we were casting for the short last time.

Narrowing it down is difficult because we had a rule that we wouldn’t request a tape from someone we genuinely didn’t think is an actual option to cast. We narrowed it down to around 40 actors total, then requested self-tapes from pretty much everyone who had showreels; we didn’t request tapes from any actors without reels because we needed to see something from the actor to know they were good.

A shocking amount of represented actors don’t have showreels by the way, which is crazy because then how would we know if they might fit the part? I’d really recommend at least some reel & great headshots - it’s obvious advice, but a lot of actors still skim on that, which you shouldn’t, it’s so so very very important.

Anyway. I think a lot casting directors don't reveal such stats, I don’t know why, but we’re not casting directors per say, we’re a production company, so I wanted to share this to remind any actors out there - the odds are not in your favour. In fact, the odds are absolutely against you. For one of the three roles, we received 599 submissions, which means that whoever we end up casting, in theory ‘beat’ 598 other actors. There are so many variables and your acting ability, whilst important, is not the only thing we take into consideration, so please don’t beat yourself up if you’re not landing jobs left and right. It’s a painful business and a numbers game, and if you love it, chances are, after 599 submissions, you just might get at least one job.

Actors: if you’ve got any questions about how Spotlight works on the other side of things, email me, and if it’s something I can share, I will.