When asked if there was a particular role that was a challenge to cast for Jon M. Chu’s Wicked duology, the films’ casting director Bernard “Bernie” Telsey highlighted Marissa Bode as Nessarose Thropp.
In conversation at Deadline’s Contenders Film: Los Angeles, Telsey, who has worked on the stage version of Wicked for the past 20-plus years, stressed how Nessarose had never been played by an actress who uses a wheelchair.
“That was something that was so important to Jon Chu and Marc Platt that we really did a search, just to find someone who was a wheelchair user, who is ‘tragically beautiful,’ as they say in the script, who can sing and who can carry the distance from the first film to the second film,” he said. “And it was also wonderful for us, because we got to meet so many new actors who, you know, who could, who it could have been. But Marissa was a real find.”
Francine Maisler, who worked on Ryan Coogler’s Sinners and Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, praised the choice in Bode, who will transform into the Wicked Witch of the East starting November 21 when Wicked: For Good arrives in theaters. Maisler also stressed the teamwork and worldwide search she and her colleagues undertake to find the right actor for a role. Relationships with directors also influence the casting process.
“The relationships are so strong with who we work with, you’re able to challenge them, and they trust you,” Maisler said. “I just finished one for Aaron Sorkin, and having just done Sinners, I fell in love with Wnumi [Mosaku], and there was a role she was right for in The Social Network [sequel] and and I just said, ‘Can you just hire her? Do we have to go through all of this?’ And he said, ‘Well, you think it’s okay if I just meet her?’ and I go, ‘Well if you must.’”
When it comes to narrowing down between the two remaining candidates for a role, Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery casting director Mary Verneiu chalked it up to “intuition” for the final decision.
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“It’s energetic, it feels like it’s kind of fate,” she said. “Once you get to that place, it’s like you feel it and you know it.”
A House of Dynamite casting director Susanne Scheel shared one filmmaker with whom she worked taking the time to connect with the three runners-up for a role who didn’t end up getting it after thoroughly combing over all four.
“He picked the one, and then he wrote letters to the other three saying, ‘I could have made four different movies, because you all four presented something so unique and so amazing, and I just had to decide which movie I wanted to make. And I’m so sorry I didn’t choose to make your version. But thank you so much for the participation,’” she shared. “And I never had a director do that, and I thought it was so extraordinary, like he had really sat down and been like, ‘Okay, I’d be choosing to make this film, this film, this film, or this film.”
Check back Monday for the panel video.