HOW I BECAME A CASTING DIRECTOR…

I was born in London, England on August 23, 1971 and moved to Chappaqua, NY when I was 6 years old. From a young age I loved music, art & theatre. My mom loved the Carpenters, so you will have to forgive me for any musical tastes that I have but I guess on some level I always identified with Karen Carpenter. I love music: ABBA, Prince, The Beatles, James Taylor, Pink Floyd and that was all before I was 13. I loved musical theatre. I remember going to Broadway seeing “The King and I,” “Oklahoma,” “Peter Pan (with Sandy Duncan),” “Les Miserables,” etc, etc, etc… When I was a kid, I thought that one day I would tread the boards and be a musical theater star. One major problem was that I could not dance - never could. I could sing and act but there was not a lot of coordination going on with my feet.

In 1997 I was living in London. I had moved to London in 1993 after graduating from a small school in Indiana. I went to the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts for a one-year classical acting course and because I have a British passport, I decided to stay in London and live there for a while and try act professionally.  By 1997 I had been in the West End, been in a critically acclaimed off-West End play, performed at the Edinburgh Festival, modeled around Europe (I was thin back then) and managed various restaurants in the grater London area. I was asked by a friend of mine to help out in a well-known casting director’s office. I needed the money and I thought it sounded like fun. Well after my first day in the office,  I fell in love with the job!

It didn’t take me very long to see that I had finally found out what I was good at – casting. From there I worked with another casting director working on music videos and commercials and from there I went out on my own and tried to get work independently. By 2001, after a few years of casting projects on my own in London, I felt like it was time to return to the U.S. If I wanted to cast, LA was where I needed to be. The decision to move to L.A was a good one, and while I missed my friends in London, my new life evolved in ways that I never expected.

I have been fortunate to cast for some wonderful directors and I have worked on all different types of projects from short films to pilots to feature films at the studio and independent level. I do not miss acting. I think that my training as an actor, not just at LAMDA but the various courses I took over the years, makes me aware of what one should be looking for in an actor.

Some of what I will blog about will be about how casting is so much more than ones eye for talent. It’s about politics, being a good communicator, learning how to work with various different egos and managing crises. I am still learning about all of this as well.

Being an independent casting director also means that I have to be smart about running my business. I have an office, overhead and a need to be bringing in money and jobs constantly. I am a freelancer and this is exciting, crazy and stressful all at the same time. Every day I learn a new lesson. But most of all casting is fun - which is why I do it. If I ever feel like I am not having fun at what I choose to do, I will have to do something else (and I have had to make that decision at least twice. Maybe I will share these stories with you over the next year). So now you have the very condensed, G-rated version of my life in casting.

If you would like to know more about me, please go to www.lessallcasting.com. Until next week…M