Citadel
DAVID CHRISCOLE | FRIDAY, 07 SEPTEMBER 2018
Casting, Actors & Auditions
Now that we've secured Grace as our Director, I had a quick turnaround to incorporate a lot of feedback and suggestions into parts of the script. This redraft was vital as it was needed for our upcoming auditions. First though, we had to add the all important ingredient... the actors!
Having discussed at length with Sean, taking into consideration his own experience in auditions, we decided to keep things very simple. There was little point in us asking our actor candidates to recite Shakespeare, or memorise a monologue. Our desire was to see the actors playing the roles they were applying for, and to see their interpretation of the character, so we intended to send out script extracts.
Calling The Actors
Our initial actor callout was launched between 2nd and 8th July, throwing ourselves once again into unknown territory. We had no way of knowing what kind of response we were going to get, but it didn't take very long for applications to start coming in. The first day was staggering, as we received over 60 applicants, which was both a relief and a surprise. However, after just the first couple of days we knew we had a problem with the role of 'William', our protagonist. Despite having ample applications for both of our other roles, we had very few for 'William', so had to push the role quite hard to gain more traction. This did work out to an extent, but we were still quite light on applications for the role by the time we finished.
Having spent a little time going through our applicants and making initial selections, we compared notes between myself, Sean, Grace and our Casting Associate Joi Rouncefield. Grace noticed that we had a distinct lack of diversity in the applicants we had selected, primarily for the two male roles. A concious decision was made to delay our final selections and push for a short POC/BAME callout through our social media platforms. Although only lasting from 18th to 20th July we managed to pull in a few additional candidates.
Audition Offers and Monster Scheduling
After completion of our callouts we ended up with over 140 applicants, with almost 90 of that number just for the female role. Having now added choices based on our last callout, we made our final selections for auditions. Sean took the reins of organising the offers and arranging the audition schedule itself, as well as handling communications with unsuccessful applicants.
As I watched the stream of emails flowing between Sean the selected actors, and keeping an eye on the schedule spreadsheet, it looked like a massive game of chess. The availability of actors altered our primary goal of just having auditions per role on each day, but in the end it all slotted in nicely.
Auditions
We were very fortunate, and immensely grateful, to have secured audition space in Manchester. First with the support of The Royal Exchange and the Open Exchange Membership and secondly through Lime Actors Agency and Management. Our four day session started Friday 3rd July, lasting until Monday 6th, with 2 days at each super venue. Unfortunately we lost a few of our selected actors during the run up to the auditions, either because of illness, getting jobs, or simply not being able to arrange time off from work.
Disappointing as that was, we ended up seeing some incredible actors during our four days. For me one of the greatest elements of this process was hearing how different actors presented their character. Adding to that the direction given by Grace, in altering the emotion of the character, it was a joy to watch the scenes being played out.
In testament to the strength of favoured actors, we decided to scrap callbacks as we simply didn't think we would get more from it.
Decisions, Decisions
The complexity of pairing actors together in their roles added to the difficulty in making our final selections, but we eventually got there. Our role offers started to go out on August 7th, and unsuccessful actors were notified on August 10th. This process was very difficult as we had to say no to many actors that I had seen many times on stage already, as well others we had only just met, but were incredible.
With all this done, we had less than 2 weeks to go before our rehearsal period starts. Suddenly it's all getting very real.