Noah Baumbach’s “Jay Kelly” is about a movie star, which is to say it’s about how hard it is to be a person — even when you’re George Clooney. The film’s focus puts a lot of emotional and frankly IMDB-rated baggage on the choices of the people who swirl around Jay’s orbit, from his publicist (Laura Dern) and his long-suffering agent (Adam Sandler) to an old mentor (Jim Broadbent) and a former rival who had to get out of the movie game (Billy Crudup). Getting that exact combination of screen presences right required pitch-perfect casting.
During IndieWire’s recent Crafts Roundtable discussion, presented in partnership with Warner Bros., “Jay Kelly” casting director Nina Gold, who has assembled murderer’s row ensembles on everything from “Game of Thrones” and “Andor” to “Conclave” and “Power of the Dog,” spoke about the tradeoffs and the decision making in the casting process as not just its own challenge, but fundamentally part of the film’s overall creative process.
“We are doing a very similar creative process to the editor or the costume designer or the cinematographer in that we’re assembling the creative possibilities and helping to choose them and [getting to make] the right decisions. It’s the same, but just with people,” Gold said.
How one establishes a base of knowledge to sort through all those people can take decades. “It’s also a kind of ongoing thing, you know. One is — for years, just all the time — trying to amass knowledge and meet new people and have thoughts about who people are, and then when the moment is right that person that you saw, you know, 17 years ago in something, suddenly is in the right place at the right time,” Gold said.
The places where Gold looks for new faces are as varied as the ones that she finds — London theater, a lot of drama school, but also anyone with a phone has almost infinite windows onto the world of actors doing interesting things. “The world is really getting small. We all have so much more access to people from everywhere and more ability to find out who’s doing what. It’s really good and interesting and diversifying. I think eventually you realize that your intuition and instinct are about all you’ve really got,” Gold said. “I think it’s the same in casting as in the whole of life, probably as luck and timing of everything.”
This conversation is presented in partnership with Netflix.