Pop Culture Happy Hour - What Makes A Great Cast?

Episode Date: March 12, 2026

This year, there's finally an Oscar being awarded for casting. The nominees are the casting directors for Sinners, Hamnet, Marty Supreme, One Battle After Another, and The Secret Agent. That got us thinking - what makes a great cast, anyway? Today, we spent some time talking about some of the nominees and casting generally.For a list of films we discussed, check out our list at Letterboxd — at letterboxd.com/nprpopculture.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

When you're deciding whether to see a movie, one of the questions you might ask is pretty simple. Who's in it? That's because we all know that one of the things that separates a good movie from a great movie or even a good movie from a bad movie is casting. This year for the first time, there's an Oscar being awarded for casting. That got us thinking, what makes a great cast anyway? How can talent, skill, charisma, chemistry, and everything else an actor brings to the table make a movie memorable? I'm Stephen Thompson. And I'm Linda Holmes. Today we're talking about what makes a great cast on Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR.

Joining us today are our co-hosts Glenn Weldon. Hello, Glenn. God, I hope I get it. How many people does he need? Oh, Glenn. And Aisha Harris, hello, Aisha. Ready for my close up, Linda. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

So, as we mentioned up top, there is finally a casting Oscar this year. It is about time. There have been casting Emmys for quite a while, so the Oscars are playing catch-up. If you haven't seen the list, the nominated casting directors are Nina Gold for Hamnet, Jennifer Van Ditty for Marty Supreme, Cassandra Kulacundis for one battle after another, Gabrielle Dominguez for The Secret Agent, and Francine Maisler for sinners. And maybe we will touch on some of those, but what we're really talking about today is casting in general and what makes a great cast work. It's a very specific skill, finding talent, not just finding the person who's going to be great, but finding the person who matches what the director wants.

So, Stephen, I'm going to start with you. What do you think of when you think about a great cast? Well, I think the key to a great cast is balance, a mix of known quantities and discoveries, powerful lead performances, memorable faces on the margins, and hopefully some discoveries along the way. I think when we talk about big name stars in movies, the casting part of the equation often, for me, boils down to whether they're the right big name for the stars, not just whether they're bankable, but whether they're bringing exactly the right energy to go with the film in question. If it's one of those movies where, like, everybody is somebody, are all those famous faces a distraction? Are they detracting instead of adding? And ultimately, as I kind of said up front, I want a sense of discovery. I want at some point to be. be like, who is that? Or even better in a way, a sense of rediscovery. Like, I haven't seen that person in forever. You thought of somebody I loved and had forgotten about. I love a comeback,

and some of my favorite casting involves kind of bringing back somebody I miss. And ideally, you want even the bit players to bring a lot of presence. And if you look at the films that are nominated for best casting this year, that's one thing I think that really jumps out is you'll just see these faces and be like, ooh, who's that guy? Who's she? So for me, it's like anything. It's a mix of many, many, many different factors, all of which have to work in concert. Yeah, that makes sense to me. That all makes sense to me. All right, Aisha, how about you? Great cast. Where does your mind go? Well, I mean, I think I echo so much of what Stephen said. And also, you know, if you listen to the show, you know that sometimes we love a good taxonomy. And while trying

to wrap my head around this, I did kind of come up with my own sort of categorizations for the things that I look for and things that apply. And I think a lot of these overlap in many ways. But, you know, I think of first, like, the raw cast, the ones where you have people who have no sort of experience whatsoever acting and you have to, like, go off of vibes, go off of how they work with the material. You have no preexisting knowledge of how they might be in front of a camera. So I think of something like, of course, the classic bicycle thieves, the Vittorio De Sica film,

or Tangerine from Sean Baker. And then, like, then there are the films that are more, I think, think they are good at showcasing a community, like an insular group of people. And every single person feels real, has their own distinct character, but they mesh well together. So something like goodfellas or do the right thing. And then like the last one I'll point out before we go deeper is like chemistry. And when I say chemistry, I mean like these people, they play well together, whether romantically or there's nothing I hate more than a movie where you don't believe that these people would actually be friends. So like when a movie doesn't.

a really good job of casting people who've seen believable as a group of friends or best friends. So I think of something like one of them days, super bad, Thelma and Louise. Like those are the things that I really look for when I'm thinking about great casts. And yeah, it's all about like jelling and believability, I think. Yeah, that makes sense to me too. All right, Glenn, I don't know. Aisha jumped in with the taxonomy. I feel like maybe she preempted you.

What have you got? Man, I tried. I really tried because I am me. I tried to come up with a taxonomy because, you know, for somebody who, takes comfort in objective truths and taxonomies and an overall lack of squishness. I mean, casting is squishy. It's chemistry. It's vibes, right?

I guess what I'm looking for is the feeling that you can't imagine that particular role being played by anyone else, that there's something definitive. You know, we talk about owning a role. That's what we're talking about. Something unique. They make choices that no other actor would think to make. Not that they couldn't because it's not really about skill set. I don't really believe that casting is about the actor's skill. I think it's about their fit, you know.

And if they're making those choices, not in the interest of showiness, but in the interest of nailing down the specifics of that character, hitting notes that other actors wouldn't. I think about the 1950 film All About Eve, because I'm a middle-aged, very basic, gay man. That stars Betty Davis, Anne Baxter, George Sanders, Celeste home, Marilyn Monroe. And I was going to say, it's like a Jenga tower. You pull any piece away, the whole thing collapses,

but that's famously not how Jenga works. You have failed at Jenga, if that's awesome. I have failed to Jagabintz. So it's like a room with like five load-bearing walls, right? And the energy that Anne Baxter gives in that thing is the ingenue is feeding the energy that Betty Davis is as the, you know, actress of a certain age. It makes her Betty Davis here, right? And then the specific dynamic between the two of them, you know, George Sanders, who's like this critic who like is snide. And if you're me, you grow up wanting to be George Sanders, wanting to be Edison to it.

Yeah. He is reacting to that specific dynamic. I think it's about specificity. Yeah. I mean, the thing that I love about this, and I agree with what all of you have already said, but the thing I love about this is that I find casting such a fascinating field because I don't really understand the skill of it. And that's actually true with a lot of things. I have to listen to people talk about how they do it in order to really understand how it's done. You talked about

fits, Glenn, and I think it's not just fit in the sense that the person fits the part. It's also that what the casting director is doing a lot of the time is funneling people to, the director. So it's to balance like what you, who you as the casting director think would be great, but also who does the director want and what is the director's vision? And there are, there are interesting stories that kind of, of casting directors, they can't like boss around the director, but they can kind of continue to nudge and nudge and try to get the person there in sort of preparation for this conversation as well as a conversation that Glenn and I had on all things considered. I watched a couple of interviews with casting directors, one of whom is this

woman named Marcia Ross, who has a YouTube video about what really goes into casting. Now, she's the woman who, among other things, cast both clueless and 10 Things I Hate About You. Classics. And she brings in for both of those movies, these giant binders. And I have no idea whether casting directors would still have these giant paper binders or not. But she has these giant paper binders, and she goes through and she actually lets you sort of spy on notes that she made at the time, or at least the notes that the casting people made at the time. So it'll be like Matt Damon they were interested in for Josh in Clueless. But her conversations about like how they cast and spying on these little lists, it was fascinating to me because that whole process I think is so interesting because some of these folks, and this is why I inevitably bring up my face.

favorite casting director to know as a fan girl who is Allison Jones. Oh, gosh. Absolutely. A woman who cast, we've been talking mostly about film, but she cast a lot of the kind of universe of the office and Parks and Rec and the Good Place. A bunch of the Paul Feig stuff, Spy and The Heat and Bridesmaids. I think Spy is a brilliantly cast movie, but also like a bunch of Judd Apatow stuff, Freaks and Geeks, which is also Paul Feig adjacent.

One of the most famously well-cast TV shows in history. Absolutely. Super bad. Knocked up the 40-year-old virgin, right? Borat, which I didn't know. And this is my favorite list is kind of these. She also cast Barbie and Booksmart and 8th grade and Lady Bird and last year, weapons. You know it has a great cast? That is a really well cast movie. And so when you look at that, it's like how influential is somebody like that who has credits? And like I didn't even mention like work on arrest. of development, V. Curb Your Enthusiasm, Fresh Prince of Bel Air. Like, imagine anybody who has significant creative credits in all of those different things. That's astonishing to me. I love thinking about how influential these folks are.

And the fact that they're not super famous is kind of weird. Yeah. She's basically at the top of a pyramid scheme of fame. Because you think about how many shows were influenced by those shows, how many shows were cast because those people were on the shows that. she cast. I mean, that's seriously one of the most influential people in Hollywood. Yeah, and the relationship between casting directors and the director, I mean, it's a relationship and you have to have incredible clear communication. But at the end of the day, the casting director casts the net, the director cooks the fish. And...

Good, good, good, I like it. You also have to deal with all the different directors that you're dealing with all their different bags of BS, because some directors are going to be wanting to be in on the conversation from the jump, some kind of parachute in at the end. I just finished this book about Twin Peaks called A Place Both Wonderful and Strange. And David Lynch's longtime casting director, Joanna Ray, said she had her eyes on these two actors for like the teenagers in the show, James Marshall and Sherrillin Fenn, who played James and Audrey. She had her eye on these two for years and years and years. But the first time she called them in, they were terrible. In her words, they were hopeless.

But she kept calling them back because she saw something in them, a phrase that comes up and casting a bunch and a bunch. And then finally, they were ready. And then for Twin Peaks, The Return, which featured a lot. of new characters, which needed a lot of new actors, Lynch didn't want to meet any of the actors. So he wanted her to talk to them on tape and they'd look at the tapes. And she said that when she's casting, she never really wants to have actors read lines, which is a buck wild thing for a casting. But she doesn't trust it because they're just going to give me the monologue they've done it a thousand times. So what she did for that particular project was she sat them down and she said, talk to me about something in your life that's interesting.

That's not the industry. And look, I know a lot of actors. They've dated some actors. And I know that many of them would be like, oh, I get to talk about me. I'm on it. But I also know that there'd be some who would hate that because they go into acting, not to hide, but they go into acting to be somebody else. So the idea that that's what that crucial decision can be made up, but that's a thing. Different casting directors have different, you know, methods.

Different directors have different methods. I mean, I think part of the reason why it's taken so long for there even to be a, category for this is because, like, for all of that, and yes, I think the fish and the cooking, that's great metaphorical line, but there's still so much variability in terms of what happens. And if you think about all the profiles you read of how movies were made and, like, it's the 20th anniversary of like whatever movie, you know, it's like, we're talking about how we cat, how often is the casting director actually ever mentioned? Like, it's often alighted.

It's often sort of just like implied, but not explicitly. stated, like, it's almost always like, well, the director like this person or whatever. And that's partially by design. I want to recommend the documentary casting by, which came out in 2012. It profiles a few different casting directors, but the one it's mainly focused on is Marion Doretti, who casts Midnight Cowboy, Lethal Weapon, Greece. But it features an interview with Taylor Hackford, who is very much like directors are the ones who actually deserve to be called directors. Like it should not be casting directors. And they

don't actually do that. And it's just like, oh my goodness, this is what they're up against. And I think because of both like the variability, all the different ways that people do get cast, I don't think it's just casting directors directly. But that's the case with all movies, right? It's like every part is variable. And the director, yes, they are the director who are as a director, but there's all these other moving parts. Yeah. It's nice that we're fine. finally kind of trying to drill down on this, but it still feels very nebulous in a way. And I think that's a good time to kind of bring up a couple of the reservations that I have about having an Oscar for casting, which I'm totally in favor of, but my fear is one that it's going

to turn into a proxy for best picture. Yeah. That people are just going to check the box of the movie they like best or the acting they like best and not necessarily think about the craft of casting. But I also wonder about the casting Oscar as essentially standing in for kind of that old Roger Ebert line about how best actor is like most acting is like most casting. Looking at the field of nominated casting this year, one of those nominated films is Marty Supreme. And if you look at the cast of Marty Supreme, it is full of kind of flashy stunt casting. It's a lot of like, here's Tyler the Creator, here's Penn Gillette, here's, you know, here are several

basketball players. Shark Tank guy. Here's Kevin O'Leary from Shark Tank. They found a way to really play against type and have him play a huge jerk. Oh, yeah. Really stretching his abilities there. I do think it's a very well-cast movie, and it has a lot of kind of interesting faces popping up all the time. But that is a very flashily cast movie compared to movies where the casting may be perfect, but so subtle that people don't notice it.

Yeah. Well, and I will say that the nominees at least, and that this gives me some comfort, right? The nominees were chosen by the casting directors branch, right? So these nominees were chosen by people who do know and care what good casting is. But, I mean, I agree with you. I think there's some possibility that that will happen, that people pick the movie they like the best. I think sometimes there's a sense that that happens with certain categories like editing that, like, people don't necessarily have, not because they're not important. Do not misunderstand me.

but because not everybody who votes has a, like, clear picture of exactly what that skill is. And I look at those nominees, and they are some of the ones I thought were cast really well. Certainly, sinners, I think, was. I think Marty Supreme is an interesting case. You're sort of into what the saffy thing is about casting or you're not, right? I really liked Kevin Garnett and Uncut Gems, didn't care that much for Kevin O'Leary and this. So I'm like, I split my cabins a little bit, like offbeat casting. Yeah.

Like I look at this list of nominees and I'm like, yeah, this is a pretty respectable set of nominees. I love that, I mean, Listen, Sinners was nominated for everything. It was eligible in, I believe. I certainly think it's very much deserving of this. It's probably what I would vote for. No. And for a film like Sinners, it fits, right? So part of this is also, and this is also the director who is responsible for like controlling the tone and controlling the performances.

but Michael B. Jordan gets a chance to do his thing. Delory, Linda, gets a chance to do his thing. But also, you allow Woonie Mosaco and Jack O'Connell in smaller parts to make their own unique impressions. I would say, in Emerald Fennell's Wuthering Heights, Alice and Oliver is Isabella. She comes in with this comic performance that doesn't quite steal the film. Comes close, but it doesn't quite steal the film. It's just a different energy. Everybody understands the assignment.

They bring their own stuff at table. They bring different things, but it feels like all of a piece. But sometimes there is such a thing as scene stealing. Right? So, Andrew Scott as Moriarty in Sherlock was a revelation, right? And you were like, oh, Moriarty's great. Who's this guy? Right. Who is Andrew Scott? And you notice Philip Seymour Hoffman in The Talented Mr. Ripley. I noticed Stephen Stucker as Johnny in airplane because you can't not. Nah. You notice Julianne Moore in Vanyan 42nd Street, Nicholas Cage in Raising Arizona. Here's a guy who makes those big choices, always owns the part. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. And that's, you know, you cast Nicholas coach because you want to roll those dice. Well, one of the examples that I kind of wanted to bring forth is jumping off of that, which is one of my taxonomy tiers is community.

And for me, one of the movies that does that's so great is Devil in a Blue Dress, the Carl Franklin film that's the adaptation of Walter Molesley's novel. And you have Denzel, Peak Denzel, Washington. And then you have all of these other characters. And you have Jennifer Beals playing this, you know, this. Well, okay, if you haven't seen the movie, see it. It's been 30 plus years. But, like, it's revealed that she is a woman who is passing for white, but she's actually biracial.

And to cast Jennifer Beals, who is probably in her obituary is going to be best known for Flashians. Let's be real. But, like, she is a black biracial woman. Just the act of casting her in that and sort of her being able to access that kind of character and what that might mean in the 1940s. And then you have, of course, Don Sheetle as Mous. And John Cheadle is the, he comes in, he's not in all that much of the movie. I rewatched it recently and I forgot like, oh, he doesn't come in until like very much well into this movie.

He comes in, he does this thing and he leaves. And he practically steals that movie from Denzo Washington. But it's those little things where you have all these different people. And Lisa Nicole Carson as Coretta. Oh, I love her. All of these different characters who feel so full and realized and they may not have that much screen time, but they are there. And when it's all working in concert together, I think it's just such a lovely thing. And the casting director on Endeavour of Blue Dress was Victoria Thomas, a black woman, who also did Djangle and Chains.

She's done The Last of Us, Edward Scissorh. Like, it's one of those things where you don't necessarily have a genre. You do everything, which I think is a little bit different from other fields in this. Like, you don't specialize. You can do everything. You have to do everything. And it feels like it's a field. that is more dependent on memory than almost any other.

And like remembering ineffable qualities about somebody you met in passing in a formal kind of cattle call setting. And it's like, oh, three years ago, I saw somebody who had a soulful quality that wasn't quite right for the character. You know, and then all of a sudden, the whole course of film and TV history changes. People get discovered that way all the time. And it really is a remarkable feel that has such extraordinary. outsized impact. Yeah, and I do want to mention one other thing, which tracks both with some of the conversation that we've had and with the nominees this year for the Oscar, which is that this is a trade in which a lot of the really well-established people are women. And, you know, we talked about

Allison Jones. We talked about Marsha Ross. And there are these two women who were business partners named Jane Jenkins and Janet Herschinson, who cast most of the Rob Reiner, Ron Howard, Chris Columbus movies of the 80s and the 90s. So that's the people who, you know, they were involved in the original, like the beginning of the Harry Potter movies, Home Alone, A Few Good Men, Stand By Me, Like, a lot of the giants in this particular field are women. I saw kind of a, I think, a very informal estimate of like 70, 75 percent, something like. that. I don't want to speculate about why, because that gets very gender essentialist and weird. But I do think it's interesting. And when you talk about how it's not necessarily something that is recognized and talked about all the time, I got to think it's at least like maybe somewhat relevant that a lot of them are women. Yeah. If there were way more men doing this, they would have had an award at least 40 years ago. Let's be real. Well, we want to know what you think makes a good cast. Find us at facebook.com slash PCHH. That brings us to the end of our

show, Glenn Weldon, Aisha Harris, Stephen Thompson. Thank you so much for being here. If I were casting a show to do for 16 years, these are the people I would cast to do it with. It's essentially what we did. Thank you. Yeah, it is. Thank you. Thank you. This episode was produced by Liz Metzger and Mike Kassif and edited by our showrunner, Jessica Reedy. Hello, come in, of course, provides our theme music. Thank you for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. I'm Linda Holmes, and we will see you all next time.