Casting directors typically audition nearly a hundred actors (or more) a day. Assistant Casting Director (formerly of while the world spins) Kate Martineau Adams gives us an inside look at what casting directors are looking for and how an actor can stand out from the crowd.
Susan Dansby: Can you talk about how many people you could see for a role on a soap opera?
Kate Martineau-Adams: Well, for roles like Reid Oliver (a great recurring role), we’d only see New York actors in that case; or people, possibly, who live in Los Angeles but would be available to hire in New York. So in that case, Mary Clay [Mary Clay Boland, Casting Director for As the World Turns] usually you would see around 80 actors for that role.
For a contract role, she would be seen by over 200 people from New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Canada, Chicago. We got tapes from everywhere. And in the old days, when we had real money, she would fly to Los Angeles. But then after that, we started getting people to record themselves and submit it. It would be an exhaustive search for a contract role.
Susan Dansby: When you look at 80 actors reading the same scene, what is the percentage, just in a ballpark, of how many of those people are giving you the exact same cursory reading?
Kate Martineau-Adams: Probably mid 90%.
Susan Dansby: Exactly. So that’s where that workout really comes in, in terms of adding texture and uniqueness.
Kate Martineau-Adams: We usually host a big session; So, we’ll see maybe 60 people in one day. That’s a full day of us watching the same five page scene, over and over. When you get the same exact reading, over and over again, at some point you just start to check a bit. So it really surprises you when someone comes in and does something a little different.
A lot of people don’t really make decisions when they get their scene, they’re so focused on it being natural that it just ends up…it’s a natural delivery; but it’s totally boring because nothing happens underneath. So you get exactly the same.
But when you have someone who thinks about the character, thinks about where that person comes from and what they bring to the table as their own individual person, that’s when you have someone who makes these very specific decisions and has an answer to everything that’s going on in That scene. Whether it’s an obvious question or if it’s something more subtextual.
