🎧 Rosalind Eleazar on the ‘Grueling’ Auditions for Chris Rock’s ‘Misty Green’

Chris Rock’s new movie Misty Green has a scene that will probably send a chill down any working actor’s spine. 

Misty, the character played by English actress Rosalind Eleazar, tries to complete a self-tape audition, perfecting the lighting and recruiting a friend to read lines off camera — all of it exactly as awkward, uncomfortable and unnatural as it sounds. And yet it’s nothing compared to what Eleazar put herself through to become Misty Green. 

“God, that was one of the hardest and most grueling processes I’ve ever been through,” she tells me on today’s episode of the Prestige Junkie podcast, recorded while Eleazar waited out a late September nor’easter in New York City after the movie’s New York Film Festival bow. “I had two Zooms, and then I flew out to L.A. for a chemistry read with Chris [who also has a key role in the movie], and then I did loads of self-tapes in between because I wasn’t happy with my Zooms.” Because she was on U.K. time, Eleazar was up in the wee hours of the morning — “to see if the phone would ring and I’d gotten the part.”

It was all a labor of love, of course — literally, Eleazar tells me she “fell in love” with Misty, an Emmy-winning actress who rose to fame in the late aughts on a nighttime soap (think Scandal), but is now struggling to book roles or even find a place to live, undone as much by Hollywood’s racism and sexism as by her own poor choices. Still, all the hard work auditioning and late nights waiting proved worth it: Misty Green announces Eleazar — an acclaimed London stage actress best known to American audiences for television work like Slow Horses and Class of ’09 — as a true leading lady, even if her character Misty doesn’t quite live up to the title.

“With someone like Misty, it’s easy to cast them off as someone that’s just problematic,” Eleazar, 38, says of her character, whom we see flub an audition after staying out late partying and slipping back into a difficult, old situationship (with a perfectly slimy Adam Driver) — and that’s just in the first 30 minutes. “She is problematic — she’s certainly that. But there are reasons why she goes out into the world punching, physically and metaphorically.”

Eleazar, who graduated from the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art and has an extensive West End resume, says she realized early that being an actor means accessing your emotions, but also protecting them. (“The industry can be brutal, you know?”) Over time, she’s learned not to linger and to throw away sides of a script once the audition is finished, among other rituals that keep her from fixating on roles she didn’t get. 

“I found that incredibly hard for Misty, though,” she admits. ”That one I couldn’t quite rip up that script and go, ‘Right, I’ll just see what happens.’”

Hear much more from Eleazar on the ups and downs of the audition process, the conversations she and Rock had about Misty’s life before the movie begins and much more on today’s episode of the Prestige Junkie podcast. The episode also includes a conversation between me, Christopher Rosen and our guest, Jacqueline Coley, the awards editor at Rotten Tomatoes, about the state of the best actress Oscar race — with Eleazar very much right there in the mix.