“The Crown,” “Slow Horses,” “Game of Thrones,” “Baby Reindeer,” “Hamnet” and “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” have one thing in common: casting director Nina Gold.
Last month, she landed her first Oscar nomination for “Hamnet” after the Academy introduced the best casting category. For years, Gold has worked behind the scenes, invisible yet responsible for bringing the biggest names to film and TV. Here, she breaks down five casting stories.
“Hamnet”
Jacobi Jupe had been on Gold’s radar. She’d seen him before, and he left an impression. The role was for “The Roses,” but he was too young to play the part
Her search for Hamnet, the title character in the Chloe Zhao film, was no easy task. Spoiler alert: Hamnet plays the young son of William Shakespeare who dies and inspires the Bard’s play “Hamlet.” “Hamnet has to go through so much,” Gold says. Her challenge was to find a child that could do all that was required “in an incredibly natural, simple, non-child-actor way.”
The initial idea was that she needed to find twins to play the young Shakespeare siblings, but that never came to fruition because it was too challenging. So, Gold called on Jupe. But the audition process was not an easy one. It took five auditions. When Jupe eventually met Zhao, he recalls, “Chloe was just the most incredible person ever. I got in the room, and I saw this woman on the chair, and just her presence in the room was so strong.”
Gold calls Jupe “super talented and brilliant.” “We met lots of good young actors, but it was an incredible stroke of fortune for Jacobi to be in the right place at the right time, at the right age… I mean, thank goodness.”
“Conclave”
Gold knew very little about the actual conclave experience. She would need a large ensemble, and a multi-national cast to reflect any accuracy. Ralph Fiennes, who plays Cardinal Lawrence, set the “standard of brilliance.” John Lithgow, Lucian Msamati and Stanley Tucci were among the other pieces. “Every person had to match Ralph at that level of brilliance.”
Landing Isabella Rossellini as Sister Agnes proved challenging. “She made it into the film despite so many problems with her availability that just kept coming up.” Gold and Rossellini’s agent were determined to get her in there, “No matter what it took.” Similarly, she had wanted to cast Sergio Castellitto “for years.” “He’s incredibly busy and never available, and somehow we managed to scramble that together as well. He’s just really so wonderful.”
“Baby Reindeer”
After seeing a handful of actresses, Jessica Gunning entered — and Gold knew from the get-go that she was “fantastic.” Gunning proved Gold correct. She didn’t just own the role; “she was brilliant and brave.” Throughout the series, Gunning could play someone who Gold felt was “kind and someone audiences could feel a lot of affection and love for, but they drive you away at the same time.” Gunning delivered on that complexity.
“Chernobyl”
Everyone needed to be able to do a British accent within a certain range, rather than a Russian accent. The casting process was a collaborative one with showrunner Craig Mazin and the producers. “We spent every day in the casting rooms meeting people, talking about it. We were obsessed.”
The cast featured Jared Harris, “Hamnet” lead actress Jessie Buckley and Barry Keoghan. Gold had previously worked with Buckley and cast her in the BBC drama series “Taboo” alongside Tom Hardy. “I’d been watching her since well before she went to drama school. She did a play, and then she went to drama school, and then she did another play and another play. I’ve been keeping my eyes on Jessie Buckley for a long time.”
On Keoghan’s character Pavel, Gold explains that character had to be in such a state of PTSD. “His approach to the character was so natural and simple and transparent, but also he could play this kind of numbness.”
In assembling the cast, she says, “It was about the creme de la creme of brilliant acting, but people who can also join together in a big group, and nobody’s trying to dominate it.”
“Star Wars: The Force Awakens”
Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy has called Gold, “a legend in her own right.” “This was all my dreams come true,” Gold says. “I had never done science-fiction. I’m generally not very good on things that have a big mythology, but with ‘Star Wars,’ that was from my youth, and it was incredibly exciting.
On casting for “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” Gold says it was “daunting to start from scratch.” They had Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher.”
“We were bringing in a whole new cast, and that was a big deal.” In finding a new cast to bring into the “lore” that meant casting actors who were “not really very well known people. So we have to be bold and go for the people we just thought were going to be the right ones. It was good. It was really fun, and it took a long time.”
Recalling Daisy Ridley’s audition, Gold says, “There was just a feeling from the very first small reading that she did in my tiny casting room.” She adds, “We then went on to see about 9 million other people, but it was impossible to get her out of our minds. She was really good. She also very sensibly came in for the first audition when the little Princess Leia blobs on the side of her head.”
As for Adam Driver, Gold had seen him in “Girls”: “He was a fucking phenomenal actor in that, and that was hard to resist, how bloody brilliant he could be.”
English (US) ·