13.3: Casting Directors – Precarious Limbo Gatekeepers

By the very nature of the career, casting is an overlooked and underresearched component of the filmmaking process. To claim success, the casting director must identify such high-quality talent that his or her part in locating the actors is effaced in favor of an assumption about the process as organic and natural: the actor “just fits” the role. Put simply, good casting happens when no one notices the casting director’s work. Even casting directors themselves elide the skills and expertise required to do their jobs well—in my conversations, they repeatedly claim they “just know it” when they meet the right person for the part. It’s much more likely that casting practices parallel the sort of creativity described by Keith Negus: “Creative practice is not approached as inspirational and radically new, nor as something that everybody does in a kind of everyday creative way. Instead, ongoing cultural production involves working with recognizable codes, conventions and expectations.”¹⁵ In other words, casting is not an exclusively intuitive, inspirational, or mystical act. Rather, it is a learned and socialized professional skill. Instead of knowing the right actor when you see her, casting directors understand that the “right” person must adhere to the standardized codes, conventions, and expectations of the industry they service. Casting directors know how to practice their trade because they were trained by other casting directors; identifying the right person is a learned and learnable skill and constitutes the knowledge capital shared among professional networks. A number of current casting directors who spoke with me were trained by the greats—the Marion Doughertys, the Ellen Lewises— and frequently compare this relationship to graduate education.

Casting is a freelance occupation. Casting directors establish careers—and financial sustainability—from job to job. This precariousness further enshrines and reproduces the standard codes and conventions that define the “right” person for the role. Radical or nontraditional casting techniques jeopardize the trust casting directors must maintain with producers and other professionals in their network, especially for casting directors who are young or new to the profession. Indeed, at an ATX Fest panel on casting, Jen Euston, casting director for Orange Is the New Black, said that it was only after she became an established casting director with ongoing and recurring work that she could walk away from a job because she disagreed with the creative vision of the producers or the network bosses. She described this privilege as an outcome of a long and arduous career—a freedom she earned that isn’t available to everyone in her profession. This anecdote underscores how the precarious nature of casting (indeed, much creative work) keeps most professionals tethered to the same ideological frames as those from whom they must gain employment. Learning casting conventions and reinforcing the status quo increase a casting director’s chances for success, but these requirements limit access and opportunity for those individuals who fall outside established codes.

My ongoing research project has been to track mechanisms the film and television industries have promoted as strategies that occasionally allow individuals—like casting directors—to circumvent the racial myopia of professional networks and practices. After spending time observing and interviewing casting directors about the ways they can or cannot incorporate diversity into their workaday practices, I identified colorblind casting as the most prominent contemporary strategy to improve diversity in the postracial era.¹⁶ Colorblind casting is the process of excluding racial identities from character descriptions, a tool to increase the number of racial or ethnic actors in front of the camera by ensuring the role is open to (literally) any body (type). While my earlier research investigated how colorblind casting informed the decisions of casting directors and how the practice affected onscreen representations, in what remains of this chapter I turn to the place of agency for actors as they navigate an industry and its gatekeepers, all operating under race- and gender-blind assumptions disconnected from the systemic obstacles designed to exclude specific individuals and representations from common business practices. Racial and ethnic minority actors are forced to play along with this game to secure employment in an industry that is always already characterized by chance, instability, and insecurity. Accordingly, actors of color are doubling down on their precariousness. As they turn to strategies to circumvent these obstacles, we find not minority groups engaged in collective resistance against systematic exclusion but individual minority actors availing themselves of whatever strategies will increase the odds in their favor, ultimately (and unsurprisingly) establishing a set of practices that not only reinforce normative white ideals by exnominating the racialization conventions of the “right fit” for whatever jobs are available but also reproduce subtle tactics of antiblackness through disavowing racial discrimination as an industrial reality. I explicate this dual process in the discussion below by identifying three strategies that help actors of color circumvent their precarious careers. These strategies are blindcasting, ambiguously raced performance, and universal discourse.