TV Casting Directors roundtable: ‘Fallout,’ ‘Fargo, ‘The Gentlemen’ and ‘Mr. and Mrs. Smith’

An actor might never forget botching an audition, but that’s certainly not what John Papsidera remembers. “A lotta people will ask, what was the worst audition you had? What did somebody do? That’s not what stays with me,” he tells Gold Derby at our Meet the Experts: TV Casting Directors panel with Rachel Tenner (“Fargo”), Dan Hubbard (“The Gentlemen”) and Carmen Cuba (“Mr. & Mrs. Smith”). What stays with me is when people rise to the occasion and you see glimpses of genius within them.”

The “Fallout” casting director says he still gets chills when he thinks of about a choice that the late Anne Heche made when she auditioned for the role of Aileen Dumont, the secretary to John Goodman‘s Huey Long in the 1995 TNT movie “Kingfish: A Story of Huey P. Long.” Many actresses busted out a notepad to jot down a dictation of a letter by Long, but Heche decided not to.

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“[She] made the choice that she was smart enough and took no notes,” Papsidera shares. “She just sat in the chair and listened to him give this page and a half speech. Got up, walked out, came back in and handed him the typed letter. The choice being she’s smart enough to remember every word that he said. It still gives me chills. It’s still an actor interpreting a role in a different way and bringing their creativity to it. Those are the moments I feel like I’m in the presence of an artist and that I cherish.”

Part of the excitement for Tenner is also when she has something in her head and an actor brings it to life. That happened while she was casting Season 5 of “Fargo” with David Rysdahl, who read for Wayne Lyon, the aw-shucks passive husband of Dot (Juno Temple). “When he did it, I was like, ‘Oh, my God!’ I don’t think I even saw anybody else. We were just like, ‘That’s it.’ Like checkmark,” she recalls. “To see it come to life like that the way you always saw it in your head when you’re reading and you’re thinking of people, and then you see it just perfect, I think that’s a really exciting moment.”

Watch the full discussion above to hear how they each got their start in casting and their thoughts on the Oscars finally adding a casting category. Click on each person’s name above to watch an individual chat.

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