‘Backrooms’ Casting Director on Kane Parsons’ Letter to Chiwetel Ejiofor

Earlier this year, you all went bananas for my chat with Heated Rivalry casting directors Sara Kay and Jenny Lewis, which tapped into a clear fascination with how new stars are minted. (But please stop sending Kay and Lewis your unsolicited shirtless photos.) 

The inverse is true as well — it’s intriguing to learn how emerging filmmakers convince legendary thespians and Academy Award nominees to board their projects. 

Wittney Horton, the casting director of Starz’s upcoming S.W.A.T. Exiles, has firsthand experience with this, having worked with Kane Parsons on casting Backrooms, a project that started as a series of YouTube short films in 2022 and turned into an A24 feature that grossed nearly $400 million worldwide in theaters. Horton also works frequently in TV on such series as Stranger Things and Snowpiercer and won a Casting Society Artios Award (shared with Carmen Cuba) for the 2013 HBO film Behind the Candelabra.

So how did Parsons convince Oscar-nominated actors Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve, as well as indie film royal Mark Duplass, to be part of his project?

For one thing, Horton conducted a mock Zoom call with the director, who was 19 at the time, before he met with Ejiofor, “mostly to prep him for the kinds of things an actor could ask,” she tells me. “I asked him to articulate the tone and style he was aiming for. I tried to get him used to talking about how he liked to work with actors — does he do a lot of takes, or a few? Does he rehearse? And to be open to how each actor likes to work, since everyone is different.”

For today’s Series Business, I’m widening my own lens to include the big screen as I’ve scored the first interview with Horton since she cast Backrooms. Her experience with Parsons reveals his powerful instincts along with everything he didn’t know, and it shows what veterans and new voices can accomplish together even as pipelines for talent change dramatically (see: Zoom auditions, vetting actors’ social followings, and my colleague Matthew Frank’s story about whether film school still makes sense in the age of YouTube). In our conversation, lightly edited, Horton shares:

• The “incredible” letter Parsons wrote to Ejiofor to convince him to consider the lead in Backrooms 
• What Ejiofor’s casting “signaled to the town”
• Why Parsons “went off the tape” and skipped chemistry reads in casting two key roles
• Why actors who audition off book — despite a SAG-AFTRA rule that they don’t have to — have a better shot
• How Stranger Things, a project “coasting under the radar,” was cast with “very little interference” from Netflix
• The obstacles to casting for TV compared to feature film — and who’s really calling the shots in each medium
• Horton’s view on actors’ social media footprints and how much they matter now
• What people don’t know about the casting process — passion, politicking and the importance of trust with reps