Casting Calls

On choosing the right face for the role, Oscar nominations and trying out for movies.

This year, for the first time, there’s an Oscar for best casting of a movie. Nina Gold is in the running for casting Hamnet. Its star, Jessie Buckley, is hotly tipped to win Best Actress on 15th March. Paul Mescal, as Shakespeare, is not nominated, and his casting as the bard has (among my friends, anyway) been divisive. My sister says she “can’t see his soul”. Others say “he looks nothing like Shakespeare”. Though what do you want? David Mitchell in the TV comedy series Upstart Crow looks quite a bit like Shakespeare, but would that make him a good romantic lead?

Paul Mescal. Shakespeare.

David Mitchell in Upstart Crow. Enough like Shakespeare for you?

Casting director Nina Gold, interviewed by Hadley Freeman in The Sunday Times¹, said she finds it easier to cast in Britain “because people’s faces here look a bit more ramshackle” (compared to the United States). A bit rude, but it’s true that fewer of us have “frozen faces” and perfect teeth.

Gold has been casting films and TV since the 1990s and her name crops up everywhere. For the excellent new BBC adaptation of William Golding’s book Lord of the Flies, according to the Times article, she trawled 200 schools to find the cast of 30 to play increasingly feral boys marooned on a remote island after a plane crash. Many had no previous acting experience. They are astonishing. Some were as young as five when filming in Malaysia started. I had to watch the “making of” documentary afterwards, to reassure myself that they hadn’t actually been traumatised by the experience.

Casting Calls

I first realised that ordinary people could be in films when Ken Loach’s now-classic movie, Kes – about a boy who trains a kestrel – was made in my home town in 1969. Barnsley schoolboy David Bradley² was cast in the lead role of Billy Casper, aged 15. Poster tagline: “He lies, cheats, steals, but has learned to survive… and doesn’t give a tupp’ny damn for anybody!… but he cares about ‘Kes’”.

Ken Loach came to my own junior school when he was casting the film. So many local faces and places turned up in it that we all felt like stars by association.

Spitting Image

When my triplet daughters were little, they’d occasionally attend castings for identical twins or triplets. I’d tell them not to get their hopes up and just to do it for the experience, but I’d feel utterly deflated when they were rejected, while they took it all in their stride.

What I considered a strength – dressing differently and having different hairstyles – was a hindrance. Casting directors want identical siblings to present like peas in a pod. I was stunned at one casting to see a mother wearing the same tartan outfit as her twin daughters, taking matchy-matchy to the next level.

Roles for twins or triplets invariably involve them speaking in unison: the more clone-like, the better, according to the movie world. Either that, or being evil or supernatural. Remember the ghostly Grady twins in The Shining? (I’m quite relieved to learn that Lisa and Louise Burns, who played the twins, didn’t continue in showbiz. One is a lawyer, the other a scientist.)

The other disadvantage was that castings were usually for two, not three. Even if the brief said “twins or triplets”, turning up with “a spare” presented a quandary.

At their first casting, for a student film, my daughters were six years old. They were asked by the director to improvise different emotions and situations. I waited outside but could hear them giggling, getting progressively more giddy, until they were running round the room wildly. The casting agent told me afterwards that she thought the girls were delightful but “a little young to take direction”.

Sure enough, it went to the older triplets with the matching alice bands and patent leather shoes who exuded calm and maturity (at age eight).

Sometimes a casting was just a long, boring wait in a corridor with no facilities, a 30-second “Hello. Could you jump up and down for me while I photograph you?” and a “Goodbye”. Sometimes it was more interesting.

Excerpt from my diary:

4th March 1997

The girls have been for a casting at the BBC today for a two-part drama series, The Beggar Bride. They need well-to-do horsey identical 10-year old twin girls. They don’t ride and aren’t posh, but hey, nothing ventured…

O, A and R handled themselves extremely well. The director congratulated them on their reading and said he might call them back. However, another set of twins dressed in pinstriped private-school blazers know a friend of the producer, so…

The next twins to go in didn’t even get to read, as I found out when they caught up with us at the tube station. I felt sorry for them. They’d waited for over an hour and had travelled a long way. Their mum said they’d been very quiet and admitted they’d never ridden a horse.

O, A and R, around that time.

The Parent Trap

The biggest opportunity was the casting for the 1998 Disney remake of The Parent Trap. In the original 1961 movie, Hayley Mills played twin sisters Annie and Hallie, who grow up on opposite sides of the Atlantic, separated by divorce, unaware of each other’s existence, meeting by chance at summer camp. They secretly switch identities so they can spend time with the parent they’ve never got to know.

For the remake, casting directors were busy in both the US and the UK, interviewing identical siblings, as well as child actresses who might be able to play both parts, like Hayley Mills had done. My daughter, Becky, recalls:

“I remember the casting for The Parent Trap most vividly out of all of them, because there were so many other children there. All the rest were sets of twins.

“They spoke to us all together in a big group and asked each of us to do things in turn, so there was a definite sense of competition, with each set of twins trying to outdo the last. (At most castings each set of twins or in our case, triplets, would be called in on their own, so this was unusual.) We had to have a go at American accents. They asked us to pretend to be at a Spice Girls concert.

“I didn’t have a clue about what to expect or what they were looking for. I never really expected to get any parts, particularly not at The Parent Trap casting, because so many of the other children were hugely confident ‘I’ve been in a West-End show’ types and they were all dressed the same, which was something my sisters and I have never done if we can help it.

“I remember castings being exciting but strange experiences. The adults never seemed quite sure what to do with us. I think the idea of dealing with children made them nervous. What they wanted were polished, professional mini-adults instead. I was mildly disappointed, but never very surprised, when we didn’t get parts.”³

The Parent Trap lead role went to an 11-year old newcomer in the US, one Lindsey Lohan, who played both twins.

It Was Just An Accident

In other pre-Oscar musings, I’ve been watching some of the nominees for Best International Film. Given the current news, my eye was drawn to Iranian director Jafar Panahi’s thriller, It Was Just An Accident. It’s riveting. It’s about a former political prisoner in Tehran who thinks he’s found the guard who interrogated him. He can’t be sure, because he was blindfolded at the time, but remembers the squeak of the guard’s peg leg. Conflicted about what to do about it, he tracks down other former prisoners to confer on whether he’s got the right man. It gives such an insight into the complexity of life in Iran at a time when we’re currently seeing it only through the lens of war.

Panahi has himself been imprisoned for his film-making, and censored, but has continued anyway. His film is listed as French in the Oscar line-up, because France financed it.

For his 2015 documentary, Taxi Tehran, he filmed covertly by driving a yellow taxi around Tehran and interviewing his passengers.

I also watched his 2000 film, The Circle, which was the first to land him in trouble with the authorities. Over the course of a day it tells interlinked stories of several women in Tehran who have escaped prison, but are not free in society.

I have all kinds of questions about how he casts and directs his movies when the stakes are so high. Brave work.

If you could award an Oscar this year, who or what film would it go to? Have you ever auditioned for a film or TV series? Please do comment – I love to hear your views.

Thank you

For responding so warmly to last week’s post about My Tattiest Books. And after all your recommendations for Detectorists after I wrote about Mackenzie Crook’s series, Small Prophets, the previous week, I’m mid-way through and loving it!

Until next time!

1. “How I cast movie stars” – casting director Nina Gold interviewed by Hadley Freeman, 7 March 2026: https://www.thetimes.com/culture/film/article/nina-gold-casting-oscar-nomination-hamnet-xw7vwvznx [paywalled article]

2. Now Dai Bradley, to avoid confusion with the other David Bradley.

3. My daughter Becky wrote last year about being one of triplets, and about the depiction of twins in movies and literature on her own Substack here.