Quotes About Casting

Whenever rejected, I thought maybe the director saw someone better suited for that role than me. I didn't think of it as so and so is someone's son or relative who got preference.

Once I know an actor suits a character, it seals the deal.

I had been doing summer stock every summer while I was in college. We did a showcase, like most good conservatories do - monologues and things that agents and casting directors come to see. From that I got an agent.

Before 'Sunny' came along, I would audition and do chemistry reads with very funny actors. And then they would cast someone who was beautiful and benign. I don't think that very funny men wanted to headline with very funny women. They wanted to be the funny ones, and they wanted the wife to be the wife. That was very frustrating.

With 'The Leftovers,' I was actually super, super lucky. It was my first major audition. When I came out, the casting director was kissing me on the face, and I was like, 'Oh, that's probably a good sign.'

1 Peter 5:6,7

Remember to vote early -- and often.

Everyone knows in the industry that when these great roles come up, every two years, there's a huge number of people up for them. I'm not one of those top five females that can personally finance any film.

Just personally, I've been attached to 'On the Road' since 2007 and it was the greatest thing in my life when I got cast in it. I couldn't believe it. When I was 17 and read the book, I looked it up on IMDb and it said that Francis Ford Coppola was going to direct it.

I've moved into directing as well as acting, and it has taught me never to take casting personally.

It never would have occurred to me in 'Days of Future Past' to cast Peter Dinklage as Bolivar Trask, and yet as soon as he got onscreen I couldn't think of anyone else.

With 'The Last Picture Show,' Peter Bogdanovich brought the script to the company that made it. They liked it, and they gave him the money he needed to make the film. He cast it with the actors that he thought were right for the parts. Now, it's the reverse.

It got so that I couldn't play anything but a Peter Lorre character.

My castings sort of go in phases. There'll be several icy professional parts - a lawyer or a cop. And then there'll be the intelligent-but-wounded group and then the period things. It goes in sequence.

I think every actor has their list of roles that were near misses. I've had my share. I was very close and almost cast in Philip Seymour Hoffman's 'Capote.'

I got space from Travis Air Force Base, went back to the Philippine Islands and made it a point to meet the only American casting director in the Philippines. I was off and running.

When I write, I imagine scenes. I write things down. I take photographs. I do some casting. I rewrite. It's a permanent making or remaking.

Let's be honest. Physicality is going to have a bearing on the parts you get. And if you think differently, you're in the wrong business.

If you go for an audition, you have a character description, and for the women, it's always about being beautiful, sexy. And for the men it's more about the character than how he appears physically. That annoys me.

I'm hardly physically right for the hero parts, now am I?

I had always felt deep down that I owned the characters. Much as I adored and cherished the work of my actors, I felt that they were cast to do and be what I could not physically do or be.

If you do well as an actor, a good director will pick up on it, and keep it in the film.

It's easier to get an actor when you just ask them to do a day on something rather than have them come in, audition, get picked.

I used to do a Saturday drama group called Young Blood Theatre Company with school-friends in west London - nothing to do with my mum and dad. A casting director came to pick people out for a new BBC children's series called 'MI High.' She picked me, I auditioned, and I got the job.