Behind the Wizard of Oz within the two-part “Wicked” films have been folks truly pulling the strings. They set the desk for the hit double-punch films lengthy earlier than the cameras ever rolled out: The casting administrators, helped decide who made it to Oz.
“Our job is to know the actors that are out there or know how to find the actors that we don’t know,” says Bernard Telsey, one of many heavy hitters on the earth of casting, who, with Tiffany Little Canfield, populated each “Wicked” films.
Casting will get some Oscar love subsequent 12 months. A brand new prize for achievement in casting was added to the Academy Awards in March, a step casting administrators imagine is lengthy overdue. The 98th Academy Awards will air stay on ABC on March 15, 2026.
“It’s really hard for people to understand what it is that we do because it’s so private,” says Telsey. “It’s only going to make the profession that much stronger and people that much more aware of what we do.”
The Emmys have three classes for casting, and the Critics Choice Awards simply added a casting trophy this 12 months. The casting trade has its personal prize, the Artios Awards, first held in 1985. But the Golden Globes and Tony Awards do not acknowledge the career.
“When casting is great, it sometimes feels invisible. Because it’s so well done, you don’t see the fingerprints,” says Destiny Lilly, president of the 1,200-strong Casting Society who additionally works with Telsey.
“I think that it’s taken time just to get recognition for that art because a lot of the work that casting directors do happens before a lot of the rest of the production team is brought on board.”
Telsey, alongside together with his staff at The Telsey Office, casts in each medium, from the movies “Mary Poppins Returns” and “Kiss of the Spider Woman” to TV reveals like “The Gilded Age” and “Only Murders in the Building.” He got here up via theater, casting such Tony Award-winners as “Maybe Happy Ending,” “Kinky Boots” and “Hairspray.”
“Wicked” and “Wicked: For Good” represented one among his staff’s largest challenges, filling a whole lot of roles and dance components over greater than a 12 months of filming and throughout continents.
Even although it could have appeared inevitable that Cynthia Erivo was a pure Elphaba and Ariana Grande was a shoo-in for Glinda, that is hindsight. Like all casting selections, it was a little bit of of venture.
“Not until they got in the room were you like, ‘Oh, this is magic. This has to be. There is nobody else to play the part but the two of them,’” he says. “You don’t really know until you get to see it.”
To preserve tabs on as many actors as doable, Telsey goes to the theater 4 or 5 nights per week and spends weekends making an attempt to atone for TV and flicks. Twice per week, he and his workers meet to commerce recommendations on who they’re seeing and make suggestions.
“Every day you feel like you’re behind and there’s another hundred actors I don’t know and how am I going to meet them and how am I going to see them? So it’s a constant race,” he says.
Casting administrators first discuss with the administrators, writers and producers to get a way of what their imaginative and prescient is for the venture after which get the precise actors to audition. Telsey likens it to how a dressing up designer should know all of the potential completely different materials and colours on the market.
Lilly just lately scored a coup by suggesting comic Bill Burr be part of the newest Broadway revival of David Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen Ross” alongside Kieran Culkin and Bob Odenkirk. It was Burr’s stage debut, however Mamet’s explosive dialogue appeared to suit completely.
“I think that there’s so many people who haven’t done theater who can really shine. They just need to be given the right opportunity and the right project and have the right director working with them,” she says.
Over the years, Telsey has seen the partitions between movie, TV and theater work fall away as actors change mediums freely. He would not subscribe to the assumption that stage expertise are so very dissimilar from display screen expertise.
“It’s a myth that they’re different. They’re technically different, but they’re the same. Good acting is good acting,” he says. “Glenn Close can do a musical, a play, a television show and a movie and be nominated in every … category. Those things have changed over the last 20 years.”
Telsey, whose first massive breakout casting was the present “Rent” — “just a little musical that nobody wanted to do,” he jokes — has additionally seen expertise change the job, particularly as auditions transfer on-line, streaming TV explodes and the film and movie enterprise get extra world.
“I think we’re always educating our teams with the need for casting to be bigger and to be covering more ground,” he says. “Most projects you have only a short amount of time to find a cast. Time is not on our side. It’s only going to get tighter as budgets get smaller for the future.”
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