Casting Director

“A day in the life of a successful casting director often involves getting ready for a casting session, sometimes a casting session will be scheduled with actors for me from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. and then I’ll schedule lunch from 1 p.m. to 2 p.m., then I will have a casting session from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. That’s really a marathon day of casting.

Some days are spent prepping and some days are spent casting, so if you’re prepping for a casting session you’re working from the office, scheduling the actors and getting everything organized. Or you’re on the phone with the director choosing the audition scene, all of that is prep work.

Then when you finally have this beautiful audition date scheduled, you print out the schedule and go run the auditions. I tend to schedule two actors every 15 minutes, that way it’s ongoing. There’s always an actor waiting to come into the room, there’s never any downtime.

It takes a village to run a casting session, so it’s not just me. Sometimes I have audition readers that read with the actors in the audition room, sometimes I have people that are just designated to be in the waiting area helping the actors sign in. Sometimes I have the writer or the director in the room with me for the audition, in which case I have to create a team. Sometimes it’s just me and my casting associate and maybe she’s on the computer scheduling the appointments for the next day, I’m running the cameras and directing the actors and then there’s an actress who’s reading with the actors who are coming in to audition. So there’s a lot of people in the room.

Oftentimes my casting associate is uploading to the website that we use, uploading the auditions so that she can send them to our colleagues. We’re really multitasking as much as possible. I also always have to have my phone on because sometimes the client calls and there’s a change. Sometimes the gender will change on the character we’re casting and we’ll have to cancel actors… It’s really, really busy.” - Jen Rudin

• Good communication and observational skills
• Diplomatic, able to balance various visions and ideas
• Love of people
• Respectful
• Highly organized
• Good memory
• Able to keep up on current media and entertainment trends
• Being instinctual, tasteful and having a strong artistic perspective
• Intuitive understanding of psychology
• Able to network
• Able to use basic technology (I.E. operate a camera, taking phone calls, scheduling and other secretarial work)
• Passion for the work being done

• In-house casting directors are typically under contract and can only do jobs for the studio they work for due to otherwise conflicts of interest, but can have other benefits that come with positions at the company they work for.
• Independent casting directors are more open as far as who they can work for, but the job becomes more self-run and commission-based. Workload and pay can depend on the jobs they are able to acquire. Major companies that have their own staff casting directors can and do still hire freelance casting directors to help manage a large, even hectic workload if multiple projects are casting at once, but those independent hire-ons are still overseen by the in-house casting directors.

Entry-level positions in casting as assistants pay entry-level salaries on a weekly or daily basis, and there is not much money to be made until well into the career. The workload can also be intense depending on the amount of auditions coming in for the roles a company is hiring for, and most work goes until the job is done, facilitating long hours.

More diversity casting, as can be seen through TV shows like ABC’s “Black-ish,” Fox’s “Empire” and Netflix’s “Orange is the New Black,” as well as on Broadway through plays like “Hamilton.”

• Watch lots of TV, movies, plays, etc.
• Take part in school drama programs
• Enjoy learning who were the actors behind characters.