{"id":318443,"date":"2026-03-08T00:57:08","date_gmt":"2026-03-08T00:57:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/318443\/"},"modified":"2026-03-08T00:57:08","modified_gmt":"2026-03-08T00:57:08","slug":"i-knew-paul-mescal-was-great-in-15-seconds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/318443\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018I knew Paul Mescal was great in 15 seconds\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

Everyone thinks they can be a casting director, don\u2019t 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\u2019s why it wasn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s absurd, given how crucial great casting is to a movie\u2019s success, and how hard it is to get right. Yet I often muse to my dryly funny and deceptively low-key friend Nina \u2014 whom I met in a yoga class 20 years ago \u2014 about who I think should play Margaret Thatcher, or Paddington Bear, or Paul McCartney on screen. <\/p>\n

It is a credit to Nina\u2019s 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<\/a>, 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\u2019s yoga guru.)<\/p>\n

\"NinaNina Gold: \u201cYou find these people and you believe in them and you just really want them to succeed\u201dAP Photo\/Chris Pizzello\/Invision<\/p>\n

When I arrive at Gold\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n

\u201cThis is very much not normal Greenpeace business,\u201d he says cheerfully. His normal Greenpeace business means he won\u2019t be able to accompany her to Los Angeles: he can\u2019t 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 \u2014 \u201cwhat a thought!\u201d \u2014 she would, she says, after a second\u2019s thought, choose Olivia Colman and \u201ca younger Ed Harris\u201d, 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. \u201cI think I might just wear something I already have, although I have bought a pair of Givenchy shoes, which I probably won\u2019t be able to walk in,\u201d she says.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\u2019s spotlight \u2014 \u201cOnly very briefly\u201d \u2014 makes her clench her teeth in horror.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt feels ridiculous to say this, in an interview talking about me, but being a casting director is a job for people who aren\u2019t seeking the limelight,\u201d she says. It is \u201cmaybe\u201d 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). \u201cIt\u2019s such a maternal job. You find these people and you believe in them and you just really want them to succeed.\u201d <\/p>\n

In 2016, Idris Elba said in a speech to parliament, referring to Gold\u2019s casting of Boyega: \u201cSince when did the lead character in Star Wars come from Peckham? Since a woman with imagination became the casting director.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"JohnJohn Boyega and Kelly Marie Tran in Star Wars: The Last JediAlamy<\/p>\n

Gold started out by casting adverts, until a chance meeting with Mike Leigh \u2014 who, somewhat improbably, was directing a McDonald\u2019s commercial \u2014 propelled her into films. \u201cCasting is a thing everybody can have an opinion on without having any technical expertise,\u201d she says. <\/p>\n

And yet, even she struggles to describe the technical expertise she uses to choose one actor over a million others. \u201cIt\u2019s about how the actor\u2019s 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\u2019t good, but because somebody else, for some unaccountable reason, seemed more right. And then what do you say? \u2018Your face is wrong?\u2019\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\u2019s The Theory of Everything, he won an Oscar. \u201cAnd you thought I was mad when I cast Matt Smith as Prince Philip,\u201d 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?\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"JessieNina Gold cast Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal in HamnetFocus Features\/Alamy<\/p>\n

\u201cWell, when I think about Shakespeare, I think of that one portrait that doesn\u2019t 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.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Mescal was summoned to Gold\u2019s small office down the road from her home to see if he had chemistry with Buckley. \u201cAnd in about 15 seconds it was clear this was going to be f***ing great. I kept dropping the camera, it was so good.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

So big-name actors are still happy to come in for auditions? \u201cOh yes. When we were casting for Les Mis\u00e9rables, 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.\u201d Jackman needn\u2019t have worried: Gold cast him as Jean Valjean.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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. \u201cBoth of those just seemed obvious to me. George and Ringo took a bit more thinking and trying things out.\u201d (In the end, Barry Keoghan was cast as Ringo Starr and Joseph Quinn as George Harrison.)\u00a0<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 especially in America \u2014 now look like interchangeable cyborgs?<\/p>\n

\"JulieJulie Walters in Mamma Mia!Alamy<\/p>\n

\u201cYeah, I find it quite challenging. It\u2019s not my favourite thing. And one thing I\u2019ve realised is it\u2019s much easier [to cast] in Britain because people\u2019s faces here look a bit more ramshackle,\u201d 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! \u201cAnd according to my brother, I\u2019ve cast Jim Broadbent in more or less every single thing I\u2019ve ever done, and that\u2019s still not enough Jim Broadbent for me.\u201d<\/p>\n

One of the biggest challenges in Hamnet was casting the Shakespeare children, because one of them \u2014 spoiler, although at this point, come on \u2014 dies in the movie. \u201cYou always have to take care with kids, and we really took a lot of care with the ones for Hamnet, because they\u2019re playing pretty traumatising stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even harder was casting for Jack Thorne\u2019s recent adaptation of Lord of the Flies<\/a>, 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. \u201cWith casting kids, there\u2019s 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\u2019re on camera, without it seeming manufactured, and you can\u2019t tell who can do that until they\u2019re literally in front of the camera.\u201d<\/p>\n

The casting director doesn\u2019t get final say over who\u2019s in the film: that\u2019s up to the director. Gold cites Leigh (every film since Topsy\u2013Turvy), Jane Campion (Bright Star, The Power of the Dog) and Ron Howard (Rush, Star Wars) as directors she especially enjoys working with, \u201calthough obviously there are loads of others\u201d, she says quickly. <\/p>\n

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. \u201cThree seasons is a long time, in terms of the royal family. And I didn\u2019t fancy doing the contemporary stuff \u2014 it was the historical that I really loved to do.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another challenge is the prickly debates over whether, for example, a straight actor can play a gay character. \u201cI don\u2019t only want to watch performances by people who have lived what they\u2019re showing you, and who am I to ask an actor what their bedroom preferences are?\u201d 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.\u00a0\u201cBut 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,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

Gold is constantly approached by people asking how they can get their child, or sister, or themselves in a film. \u201cBut the truth is, I haven\u2019t got the magic wand people think I have. Really, most of the time, I\u2019m in the business of dashing people\u2019s hopes and dreams,\u201d she says. Just then, the doorbell rings. \u201cIt\u2019s my Givenchy shoes,\u201d she says, running to the door. Gold would never have cast herself as Cinderella, but she is going to the ball. <\/p>\n

The 98th Academy Awards will be shown live on ITV on Mar 15, from 10.30pm<\/p>\n

Which actors do you think were cast perfectly for their roles? Let us know in the comments below<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Everyone thinks they can be a casting director, don\u2019t they? It seems more like a parlour game than…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":318444,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[156,409,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-318443","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/318443","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=318443"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/318443\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/318444"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=318443"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=318443"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=318443"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}