Everyone thinks they can be a casting director, don’t they? It seems more like a parlour game than a job, matching up which actor could best play Queen Elizabeth II or the Pope. Maybe that’s why it wasn’t until the 1970s that casting directors were regularly credited by name in films, and it took until, er, this year for the Academy Awards to create a best casting category, six years after the Baftas did likewise.
It’s absurd, given how crucial great casting is to a movie’s success, and how hard it is to get right. Yet I often muse to my dryly funny and deceptively low-key friend Nina — whom I met in a yoga class 20 years ago — about who I think should play Margaret Thatcher, or Paddington Bear, or Paul McCartney on screen.
It is a credit to Nina’s great forbearance that she is still my friend, because she is Nina Gold, 59, the most revered casting director in the world, who has cast all of the above roles, in, respectively, The Crown, Conclave, The Iron Lady, Paddington and the upcoming Beatles movies. She has cast British gems (Chernobyl, Slow Horses) and Hollywood franchises (Star Wars, Jurassic World). And now she is the frontrunner to win the inaugural best casting Oscar on March 15 for her work on Hamnet, adding it to her awards collection, which includes a Bafta and several Emmys for Game of Thrones, The Crown and Baby Reindeer. (Incidentally, she is yet to go with any of my casting suggestions, but she did cast our yoga teacher, Stewart Gilchrist, in Paddington 2, as the bear’s yoga guru.)
Nina Gold: “You find these people and you believe in them and you just really want them to succeed”AP Photo/Chris Pizzello/Invision
When I arrive at Gold’s home in northwest London, which she shares with her partner, Frank Hewetson, who works for Greenpeace, and their two children, Hewetson is on his way out to pick up some jewellery that Gold might borrow for the Oscars from a friend.
“This is very much not normal Greenpeace business,” he says cheerfully. His normal Greenpeace business means he won’t be able to accompany her to Los Angeles: he can’t travel to the US due to multiple arrests for his environmental activism, so one of their children will go as her date. If she had to cast actors to play her and Hewetson in a film — “what a thought!” — she would, she says, after a second’s thought, choose Olivia Colman and “a younger Ed Harris”, and she is, of course, bang on. Gold cackles when I ask if she has hired a stylist to help her to choose an Oscars outfit. “I think I might just wear something I already have, although I have bought a pair of Givenchy shoes, which I probably won’t be able to walk in,” she says.
Gold has propelled so many actors into the spotlight, including Sally Hawkins (Happy-Go-Lucky), John Boyega (Attack the Block), Claire Foy (Wolf Hall, The Crown) and Ben Whishaw (Bright Star, Paddington). But the suggestion that she is about to be in the world’s spotlight — “Only very briefly” — makes her clench her teeth in horror.
“It feels ridiculous to say this, in an interview talking about me, but being a casting director is a job for people who aren’t seeking the limelight,” she says. It is “maybe” for that reason that the vast majority of casting directors are women (which might also be why it took so long for the profession to be acknowledged by the industry). “It’s such a maternal job. You find these people and you believe in them and you just really want them to succeed.”
In 2016, Idris Elba said in a speech to parliament, referring to Gold’s casting of Boyega: “Since when did the lead character in Star Wars come from Peckham? Since a woman with imagination became the casting director.”
John Boyega and Kelly Marie Tran in Star Wars: The Last JediAlamy
Gold started out by casting adverts, until a chance meeting with Mike Leigh — who, somewhat improbably, was directing a McDonald’s commercial — propelled her into films. “Casting is a thing everybody can have an opinion on without having any technical expertise,” she says.
And yet, even she struggles to describe the technical expertise she uses to choose one actor over a million others. “It’s about how the actor’s essence intersects with the character on the page. So the crazy, terrible thing is that normally someone will get passed over, not because they weren’t good, but because somebody else, for some unaccountable reason, seemed more right. And then what do you say? ‘Your face is wrong?’”
She is especially good at casting actors whose faces look nothing like those of the historical people they are playing. Few would have confused Eddie Redmayne with Stephen Hawking, and yet when Gold cast him in 2014’s The Theory of Everything, he won an Oscar. “And you thought I was mad when I cast Matt Smith as Prince Philip,” she says with a smile. I did, and yet he was perfect in the first season of The Crown. Did her heart sink when she realised she would have to find someone to play William Shakespeare in Hamnet?
Nina Gold cast Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal in HamnetFocus Features/Alamy
“Well, when I think about Shakespeare, I think of that one portrait that doesn’t have much detail besides the goatee, right? So instead it became about him being a counterpart to Jessie Buckley as his wife. Her character is so earthbound and embodied, and because everything Paul Mescal has done is about being interior and thoughtful, we thought that could work.”
Mescal was summoned to Gold’s small office down the road from her home to see if he had chemistry with Buckley. “And in about 15 seconds it was clear this was going to be f***ing great. I kept dropping the camera, it was so good.”
So big-name actors are still happy to come in for auditions? “Oh yes. When we were casting for Les Misérables, Hugh Jackman came into this tiny studio in New York, where there was a tap-dancing class in the room to one side and a judo class on the other side. But he came in and sung, and it was incredible: you felt you were going to be blown out of the room by the power of it. But he clearly found it nerve-racking, because singing auditions are the most terrifying.” Jackman needn’t have worried: Gold cast him as Jean Valjean.
After Hamnet, Gold cast Mescal again, this time as McCartney in the new Beatles films by Sam Mendes that are being shot now, and Harris Dickinson as John Lennon. “Both of those just seemed obvious to me. George and Ringo took a bit more thinking and trying things out.” (In the end, Barry Keoghan was cast as Ringo Starr and Joseph Quinn as George Harrison.)
Like Gold, Buckley is also tipped to win an Oscar for Hamnet this month. Part of what makes her performance seem so extraordinary is how mobile her face is, contorting in grief when too many other actresses these days have frozen faces. How does a casting director cope when so many actresses — especially in America — now look like interchangeable cyborgs?
Julie Walters in Mamma Mia!Alamy
“Yeah, I find it quite challenging. It’s not my favourite thing. And one thing I’ve realised is it’s much easier [to cast] in Britain because people’s faces here look a bit more ramshackle,” she says in a tone of approval. As a result, Gold is known for sneaking British actors into big-budget American movies, including Colin Firth, Julie Walters and Dominic Cooper in Mamma Mia! “And according to my brother, I’ve cast Jim Broadbent in more or less every single thing I’ve ever done, and that’s still not enough Jim Broadbent for me.”
One of the biggest challenges in Hamnet was casting the Shakespeare children, because one of them — spoiler, although at this point, come on — dies in the movie. “You always have to take care with kids, and we really took a lot of care with the ones for Hamnet, because they’re playing pretty traumatising stuff.”
Even harder was casting for Jack Thorne’s recent adaptation of Lord of the Flies, for which she and her assistant visited more than 200 schools around the country to find 30 boys, aged between 5 and 13, with no acting experience. “With casting kids, there’s no real way around the labour-intensive numbers game of it. Because what you want is a kid who seems to have their internal life readily available for us when they’re on camera, without it seeming manufactured, and you can’t tell who can do that until they’re literally in front of the camera.”
The casting director doesn’t get final say over who’s in the film: that’s up to the director. Gold cites Leigh (every film since Topsy–Turvy), Jane Campion (Bright Star, The Power of the Dog) and Ron Howard (Rush, Star Wars) as directors she especially enjoys working with, “although obviously there are loads of others”, she says quickly.
A lot of her job is about persuading directors to go with her choices, and that can be difficult when everyone has ideas about who should play, for example, Winston Churchill in The Crown (Gold went left-field, opting for the American John Lithgow, who was note-perfect). She only stayed for the first three seasons of The Crown, although she dismisses rumours this had anything to do with Peter Morgan, creator of the series, becoming increasingly controlling. “Three seasons is a long time, in terms of the royal family. And I didn’t fancy doing the contemporary stuff — it was the historical that I really loved to do.”
Another challenge is the prickly debates over whether, for example, a straight actor can play a gay character. “I don’t only want to watch performances by people who have lived what they’re showing you, and who am I to ask an actor what their bedroom preferences are?” Gold says. In 2021 Redmayne apologised for playing a man who undergoes surgery to live as a woman in The Danish Girl, which Gold cast. “But Eddie was brilliant in that part, and in fact, for a while, an actress was going to play that role, which, from the contemplation of gender, would have been more wrong,” she says.
Gold is constantly approached by people asking how they can get their child, or sister, or themselves in a film. “But the truth is, I haven’t got the magic wand people think I have. Really, most of the time, I’m in the business of dashing people’s hopes and dreams,” she says. Just then, the doorbell rings. “It’s my Givenchy shoes,” she says, running to the door. Gold would never have cast herself as Cinderella, but she is going to the ball.
The 98th Academy Awards will be shown live on ITV on Mar 15, from 10.30pm
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