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Martin Scorsese once said casting was 85 to 95 per cent of a film. Despite it being his name plastered across posters for movies like Goodfellas and Mean Streets, he says it was those who cast the films who truly set them up for success.
Yet despite Scorsese’s shining endorsement, casting has remained largely overlooked for decades, relegated to a brief “casting by” credit at the end of a movie. A proposal to add best casting to the Oscars was rejected by the Academy in 1999. In the 2012 documentary Casting By, former president of the Directors Guild of America Taylor Hackford even went so far as to say the title casting director was incorrect as they “don’t direct anything”, and there is only one director on set.
But after years of campaigning for proper recognition, casting directors are about to finally receive their due. For the first time ever, the 2026 Academy Awards will celebrate casting directors in a new category. The inaugural nominees include the casting directors of Hamnet, Marty Supreme, One Battle After Another, The Secret Agent and Sinners.
This is no small matter. A new category hasn’t been introduced at the Oscars since 2001 when best animated feature joined the table. Before that, the last new category to be implemented was best makeup and hairstyling in 1981 (first awarded in 1982). But beyond the rarity of adding new categories to the Oscars, why is the new casting award such a big deal?
Thea McLeod, president of the Casting Guild of Australia (CGA) and founder of McLeod Casting, puts it simply: without casting directors, movies and television shows wouldn’t exist.
“In the old days, casting directors were mostly attached to studios. So, we just kind of got sidelined because once the cast is there, our work is done,” McLeod says, noting that casting directors are one of the first departments to work on a project, meaning they’re also one of the first to leave it.
Though some directors have been known to take credit for their films’ ensembles, McLeod says casting is an extremely collaborative process involving the writer, director and producers. The choices casting directors make ultimately help facilitate the director’s vision – an impressive feat for such a small creative community (there are currently only about 76 members in the Australian casting guild).
For example, the Evelyn Wong character in Everything Everywhere All At Once (primarily cast by Sarah Halley Finn) was originally written with Jackie Chan in mind. However, Halley Finn in consultation with directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert gender-swapped the role, offering it to Michelle Yeoh. This entirely changed the film, transforming it into a deep exploration of mother-daughter dynamics that ultimately won best picture and best actress at the 2023 Oscars.
Making these decisions is not as simple as “going with your gut”. Though instincts do play a role in casting, McLeod says it’s more like piecing together a puzzle. “It’s a creative process because we’ve read the scripts and the character breakdowns, and we’ve worked with the directors and the producers, so that’s when we start visualising who could be right for the roles.”
Award-winning senior casting director Stevie Ray says it’s then a matter of “cherry-picking” the most promising talent from the waves of actors available, all of whom have different sets of skills and abilities that could suit different types of film.
“We’re not necessarily always trying to find the actor who’s the best at acting,” says Ray, who has worked on productions such as Spiderhead and Colin From Accounts. “We’re trying to find the right actor, the one that feels right for that role in that project. And in so doing we help create the world of the story. We’re helping shape how the world feels and the tone of it through the casting. There’s lots of movie magic and many other departments that equally are responsible for that world-building, but ours is the people part of it.”
The trials and tribulations of recasting
One of the scariest things to navigate for a casting director is recasting, says Anousha Zarkesh, whose casting company has worked on films such as The Correspondent and The New Boy.
Recasts have been known to cause quite a stir, such as when Maria Bello took over for Rachel Weisz in The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor. Similar goes for the recasting of iconic characters – thousands of fans sent letters of complaints to Warner Bros. after it was revealed Michael Keaton had been cast as Batman in 1989.
“Our job is to go, ‘Okay, we either go as close to the original as possible, or we find someone diametrically the opposite, depending on what the filmmakers want to do’. You then just hope the audience accepts it, but you never know,” Zarkesh says.
In some ways, however, it’s exciting for casting directors to be part of the evolution of a certain character, especially if it means pulling it into the modern age. For example, each iteration of James Bond has defined the next era of the franchise.
When it works, it really is magic. Take one of this year’s Oscar nominees, One Battle After Another. While Leonardo DiCaprio is strong in the leading role, it’s his chemistry with co-stars Teyana Taylor, Benicio del Toro and break-out star Chase Infiniti that truly makes the film shine.
Great casting shouldn’t be immediately noticeable, says Anousha Zarkesh, an Australian casting director with over 25 years’ experience.
“You watch it, and you just think, ‘I’m in the world. I don’t question any character’. It’s almost like silent perfection,” Zarkesh says. “Usually, we’ve done the legwork for months and months and months … We’ve auditioned 50,000 [people] or whatever. We’ve searched high and low to find these incredible performers. The director doesn’t do that. We do that.”
One of her most notable auditions was a teenager from Perth who happened to be Heath Ledger. “He blew me away. I’ve never been so excited by a 17-year-old boy walking in the room. I rang Shanahan [Management] straight away and said: ‘You’ve got to see this kid’.”
As for the casting directors nominated at the Oscars this year (including Hamnet’s Nina Gold and Sinners’ Francine Maisler), McLeod says it’s too difficult to call.
“They’ve been nominated and that’s the achievement,” she says. “It’s not just about the person who wins. It’s about going, ‘that’s put that project on the map and celebrated our art and our industry’.”
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