I’m deputy editor at The Ankler and co-host of the Prestige Junkie podcast. My special Art & Crafts series this week celebrates the talented artisans behind Emmy’s top contenders, including cinematographers and composers.
When Industry creators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay moved to creatively reboot their acclaimed HBO series after its third season, it required not just new directions for longtime cast members Marisa Abela and Myha’la, but also adding major new characters — including Whitney Halberstram (Max Minghella), the enigmatic, sociopathic CEO of fintech startup Tender.
“Casting an ensemble is always a complicated jigsaw puzzle,” Industry casting director Julie Harkin says. “But when you’re further into a show, and you’re adding people to the jigsaw, you’ve really got to think through the dynamics that everyone would have with each other.”
Fortunately, Harkin had known Minghella for a long time — she cast his 2018 feature directing debut, Teen Spirit, and felt he’d be an ideal foil for the Industry cast, including Kit Harington. The psycho-sexual, codependent relationship between Whitney and Harington’s Henry Muck — an aristocratic failson who becomes the fall guy for Tender after Whitney’s lies and deception around the company are revealed — was one of the season’s crucial story pillars.
“I always knew that he and Kit would be electric together, because they’re just both so talented and, in real life, are the loveliest humans,” Harkin says. “I just thought, ‘Oh, they’re just gonna have the time of their lives acting together.’”
But Minghella wasn’t the only addition of note to season four. Harkin also cast a couple of longtime television stars against type — with Stranger Things actor Charlie Heaton (who played the earnest teen Jonathan on the Netflix hit) as a doomed, drug-addled journalist, and Mad Men child star Kiernan Shipka playing a scheming sex worker who engages in a wild threesome with Abela’s Yasmin and Harington’s Muck.
Harkin, who has cast shows as varied as I May Destroy You and Dune: Prophecy, says casting against type is one of her favorite things.
“It makes the whole casting process more fun when you think outside of the box,” she says. “I went to drama school myself when I was 18, and I have a lot of actor friends, and I see careers go in a very predictable way where people are put into roles that they stereotypically would fill. It’s so much more interesting for the actor and for us to push against that.”
No Small Parts
Casting directors David Rubin and Matt Lander didn’t have to build the ensemble of Margo’s Got Money Troubles from scratch: Stars Elle Fanning and Nicole Kidman were with the David E. Kelley project from its inception, and Michelle Pfeiffer, who is married to Kelley, was added soon after the A24 series landed at Apple TV.
But Margo’s Got Money Troubles — about a college student (Fanning) who turns to OnlyFans to make ends meet after an affair with a professor results in her becoming a single mother — hinges on the relationship between Margo and her pro-wrestler father, Jinx. He’s a somewhat comedic presence in Margo’s life whose addiction and recovery storyline makes for one of the show’s most emotional tentpoles.
“It’s such an essential part of the key elements in the story,” Rubin says. “We spent our initial time focusing on that role.”
To fill the part, Rubin and Lander landed on Nick Offerman, an Emmy winner for his dramatic turn in HBO’s The Last of Us and well known for his comedy work on NBC’s Parks and Recreation. “He managed to deliver exactly what we were looking for,” Rubin says. “But we weren’t surprised by how brilliant he is. It really is about having seen him show tremendous versatility over a long period of time. It made him sort of an obvious choice and a great get.”
Rubin, a two-time Emmy winner, is a casting legend, responsible for numerous ’90s classics, including My Best Friend’s Wedding, My Cousin Vinny, The Talented Mr. Ripley and Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet. Lander worked with Rubin on A Series of Unfortunate Events and Big Little Lies as a casting assistant before being elevated to casting director on the pilot for Tiny Beautiful Things.
“We’re in the trenches on everything together,” Lander says of his collaboration with Rubin. “We do our lists for the lead actors separately and come together and discuss. It’s a great sounding board before we talk to the other creatives. We watch every tape, every submission that comes in, every demo reel, and it’s great that we have very similar taste.”
Together, the pair have worked with Kelley and Kidman several times — including Big Little Lies, Nine Perfect Strangers and now Margo’s Got Money Troubles. “The great pleasure of working with David Kelley is how specific he is in the writing of supporting characters,” Rubins says, “and the clarity with which they play a very important part in the narrative.”
Adds Lander, “On Big Little Lies, even down to the Starbucks barista opposite Meryl Streep — everything has a point, everything has a purpose. When you have well-defined roles that have something to do, even in the smallest moments, it helps you get a better class of actor for each role. And I think that adds up throughout the course of an episode in the series.”
Kids Are All Right
William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies is a staple of high school classrooms, and the dark survival tale about a group of young boys stranded on an island who resort to tribalism with deadly consequences has been adapted for the screen, directly or indirectly, several times before.
But for the latest Lord of the Flies adaptation (from Adolescence and Harry Potter and the Cursed Child writer Jack Thorne), casting directors Nina Gold and Martin Ware — Emmy winners for Baby Reindeer — felt like they were starting from scratch.
“We tried to be at the beginning as open-minded as possible about who these boys could be,” Ware says. “We just wanted to go and hunt for the best young boys out there — and hope that as we did that and through that process, they would start to align with one or sometimes more of these characters.”
“We did a lot of group workshops with moving people around, getting people to play different parts,” Gold adds. “We tried Winston Sawyers [who plays Ralph] and Lox Pratt [who plays Jack] in the opposite roles. It started pretty broad, or the possibilities were much greater of how each person could fit into it — and then we narrowed it and narrowed it.”
First published in 1954, The Lord of the Flies focuses primarily on three key boys: Ralph and Jack, both of whom wind up leading opposing factions on the island, and the doomed Piggy (David McKenna), whose tragic death is one of the most infamous in literary history.
“He came into our lives quite late during the process,” Ware says of McKenna, who next has a role in Greta Gerwig’s upcoming Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew. After responding to outreach on social media, McKenna, who lives in Belfast, sent a self-tape to Gold and Ware.
“It was interesting. It wasn’t perfect, but there was enough there to make us want to spend half an hour on a Zoom call with him,” Ware says of the audition. “Then, we could see that he was really great.”
“Our job is then more about seeing some potential,” adds Gold, an Oscar nominee earlier this year for casting Hamnet. “It’s definitely a process of discovery.”
The collaboration between Gold and Ware goes back 11 years, and together, they’ve worked on numerous projects, including Andor, Baby Reindeer and Conclave. But Lord of the Flies proved daunting because they had to find not just the right mix of children to play the challenging material, but also the right parents or guardians. Being cast on the show required at least one adult to accompany the child actor to Malaysia for four months or more. (“It was a big deal,” says Gold.)
Fortunately, the best of the grownups understood the stakes — and their own limitations. As Gold recalls, there was one child who got pretty far along in the process and seemed on track to land a role. But after a conversation with his parents about what the gig would entail, they bowed out.
“They came to the conclusion that it was not something they could do with the whole family,” Gold says. “They realized this was not the moment for them. That was, you know, a very sensible thing.”
