How to cast more and diverse actors - A casting process breakdown for Supernatural Sexuality with Doctor Seabrooke
/One thing that perceptive listeners of Supernatural Sexuality with Doctor Seabrooke are likely to notice is just how many people are involved in the show - Every episode has 3 writers and at least 4 actors (sometimes more), and the majority of these change for every episode. In fact, the show’s first season has 37 call segments, written by 18 writers, which called for 39 speaking roles. Even if I got to take one role, that’s still 38 roles that need to be filled.
Now, some producers might suddenly turn white at that number, because it’s a lot. The idea of engaging in a casting call with that many roles probably seems really intimidating, not to mention trying to keep everyone’s contribution organised!
And as well as the sheer number of actors, we had another big goal in mind with our casting - we wanted, as best as we could, to cast as diversely as possible, right from the get go. This was particularly important to us, as producers, because that’s something that we haven’t always done well at with our previous productions. While we’ve always been pretty good at casting diversely when it comes to gender and sexuality, our track record with race started out on a pretty poor footing. Season 1 of Love and Luck, much to our everlasting regret, had not a single actor of colour, and while we’ve worked to improve this, in all of our productions, for Seabrooke, we wanted to work really hard to get racial diversity into our cast from the very beginning, and learn from the mistakes we’ve made previously.
So, all up, a pretty big ask - Cast 38 actors, and get as many people of color and other underrepresented groups into the show as possible. Something like this doesn’t happen without a plan, and without some thought into the casting process, and today, we’d like to share with you how we did it.
The casting process can pretty easily be split into two different processes - our process for casting Dr Seabrooke herself, and our process for casting all our callers.
Casting our Doctor Seabrooke
Doctor Seabrooke, our primary character on the show, was going to be the primary voice in this production, and as a result, we had a few constraints in casting her. Firstly, due to the large amount of work involved, and the nature of the rest of the production, it wasn’t reasonable to hire a remote actor, so we had to find someone who could record with us in-studio locally. Secondly, we very strongly wanted an actor of colour in the main role!
Seabrooke’s casting call was actually the most straightforward and standard of our characters - We created a page with sides specific to the character, we then created a Google Form specifically for Seabrooke auditions. The Google form not only asked for general information and an audition recording, we also asked for some basic demographic data from our candidates so we could help select for under-represented demographics. We knew from casting on Love and Luck that finding actors of colour willing to come on board can be difficult, so to improve our chances, we also used an Australian casting site, called Starnow, to cast as wide a net as possible.
Awkwardly, however, Starnow does not provide the option of providing sides for people to send, or provide an ability for auditioners to actually send auditions in, which added a slight wrinkle to our plans. One of our primary tenets of casting is that we do not listen to auditions before the closing date, and we work very hard to ensure that we listen to everyone as close together as possible. With the way Starnow operates, we couldn’t quite work this way, and we had to adapt our preferred casting process.
Unsurprisingly, we had a huge number of people apply on Starnow (and our google form!) who weren’t eligible for the role (because they lived outside of Victoria, Australia), but between Starnow and our Google form, we ended up with 66 Applicants who were eligible. Of those, 7 were people of colour, 1 was transgender, 1 was non-binary. At this point, we started the long process of going through all of these applicants, and working to create a shortlist. For Google Form auditions, it was a simple matter of listening through the audition. For Starnow applicants, we needed to go through their presented reels of work on their profiles, and start making quick decisions about which voices we could reasonably go for. Part of this work was also demographically-focused - because we had relatively few actors of colour apply, we made a key decision that, unless a person in an underrepresented demographic was just entirely inappropriate for the role, we’d keep them through to the shortlist, because, as we mentioned above, we wanted very strongly to have a person of color in the main role if that was at all possible.
Eventually, we ended up with a shortlist of 10 candidates. Of those candidates, we ended up with 6 actors of colour. At this point, we contacted the Starnow candidates and requested they email us an audition recording, so we could compare our Starnow candidates and Google Form candidates on an equal playing field. At this point, the casting process continued in a pretty standard fashion - we would listen to each recording at least twice, and the two of us would rate each audition based on how much we liked them. At first, we’d keep a candidate if either one of us rated them highly, then we’d only keep a candidate if both of us rated them highly, and once we hit that point, it was mostly a matter of discussing who we wanted, and why this person over another to try and eliminate further candidates.
In the end, the Doctor Seabrooke we chose was an actor of color who lived just outside Melbourne, Mama Boho. The final marks in her column were that she had previous radio and commercial experience, had done work around sex and sexuality previously, so wouldn’t be awkward around some of the racier calls, and had a voice that we felt worked exceptionally well for the show.
Casting our Callers
Casting our callers was a completely different beast! For one thing, we had significantly less constraints around casting - we were completely open to both remote actors with their own setup, and local actors in Melbourne, who could either come to our place to record (since a studio sound wasn’t actually required for their pieces), or we could come to their place to record (since our home recording setup was highly portable). We made this clear in our casting call, specifically because we wanted local disabled people to be aware that we were happy to accomodate for them if leaving home was an issue.
As such, we set up two different Google Forms – one for actors who could record with us in Melbourne, and one for actors who would be recording remotely. We did this because with remote actors, we need to audition their audio quality as well, whereas for local actors the audio quality of their audition isn’t relevant because we could set up a good recording environment for them. Because we wanted to explicitly choose for a diverse cast, and because we wanted to cast true to type where possible, like on the Doctor Seabrooke audition form, we explicitly asked actors for gender, cultural background, disability, queerness, and a few other items. Further, because we wanted to make sure that everyone would be comfortable with the roles they received (and because we knew we would be casting queer actors of many stripes), we also explicitly asked actors about their comfort level around being cast as a gender not their own
Instead of putting all 37 caller characters up, with specific sides for each role, we decided to instead put a generic set of sides and asked each actor to play through all of them, in their natural voice. The sides were all single lines, with different emotional beats for each line. Because we weren’t aiming to hear a specific voice, we wanted to get a varied range of lines so we could hear where an actor’s strengths were. The natural voice bit was important too – while we had a few characters who would require specific character voices, we wanted our roles to be as naturalistic as possible – even our monster callers are people first up, and we wanted to reflect that.
It seems that not providing specific roles turned out to be to our advantage regarding our desire for a diverse cast – with no clues as to what kind of character they might be casting for, it seems that a lot of trans actors, actors of colour, and linguistically diverse actors were more comfortable sending in auditions, much more so than with our Seabrooke casting. We ended up receiving 14 local auditions and 65 remote auditions, for a total of 79 auditions all together. Of this group:
16 identified as people of colour
13 identified as transgendered
17 identified as some form of diverse gender (non-binary, genderqueer or agender)
11 identified as some form of cultural or linguistically diverse background (were from non-English speaking backgrounds, or from some marginalised cultural group, like being Jewish)
(It’s worth noting that these categories do overlap significantly)
Because we weren’t dealing with external sites or the like, collating all our auditions was a pretty simple process. Once auditions closed, we could simply pull the Google Form data into a Google Sheet, download each audition reel, and start listening. We dedicated several days to casting callers – with so many auditions, it would take some work to get through all of them. Some callers had been written to specific demographics (ie were trans, nonbinary, etc), and since we felt casting true to type was important, we cast these roles first. Once these were done, we split the leftover roles into men and women, and started going through everyone.
For each of these role, we made a conscious decision to listen to under-represented voices first – if after going through these voices, we didn’t find what we were looking for, only then would we start going through white cisgendered voices for those roles. This was a way of “resetting” our biases towards people we wanted to bias for, by using primacy and order biases to our advantage.
Because of the complexity of the process, we didn’t have shortlists as such for the callers. Many actors I loved a lot and was desperate to cast anywhere, some actors came up for a lot of roles and we had to make hard decisions as to which person we wanted to run with, but ultimately our casting was more about matching the right actor to the right part, with the occasional hard choice when we had multiple actors who might fit well. For the “character” roles, where we needed a specific voice, we tended to more aim towards those who mentioned more flexibility in their voices (one actor we chose for a particular character voice because they had done puppeteering work previously). While we invited people to provide reels of their work on other shows, we didn’t tend to listen to them, only really going to them when we had a number of people we couldn’t decide between, and wanted more details about what they were capable of. Much of this was because we were often listening to the audition recordings repeatedly, and in general, we wanted to compare like to like where possible, to try and maintain fairness while casting.
In the end, of our 37 Caller roles:
10 actors identify as people of colour (with another 1 identifying as Indigenous American)
6 actors identify as having culturally or linguistically diverse backgrounds.
22 actors identify as LGBQA+
7 actors identify as transgender
5 actors identify as disabled (of which 2 identify as D/deaf)
In fact, only 3 actors in our cast do not identify as one of the above! We consider this an excellent start, although we’re quite aware that this only a start - a little over 25% people of colour, in particular, we are certain we can improve upon during our next season’s casting.
Where can we improve?
So, to finish off, we want to have a brief discussion on how we plan to uplift the number of under-represented demographics in our show next year.
So, one of the big issue around trying to cast people of colour, is working to convince people of colour to actually take the step to audition. It’s unfortunately not as simple as noting “people of colour are encouraged to audition”, especially when you yourself are not a person of color. We are both white, and this impacts audition rates - what evidence do people of colour have that we will treat them well, that we will not use them as caricatures, that we’re not racist dickheads?
The answer, really, is to really work on engaging with people of colour, to build those networks and gain that trust. It’s a slow process, and not an easy one. When we selected writers for Seabrooke, we had a similar issue with getting writers of colour on board - while we happily worked with the people who applied, we didn’t have the connections to really push our project to the communities of writers of colour that are out there, so we had very few writers of colour.
This year, we intend to work a lot harder at this. We now have the benefit of having a season of production under our belt, and getting to show the people of colour (hopefully!) that we’re good to work with, and as such, we have made it a point this year to ensure that, when we look for new writers, that we only accept writers of colour. The actors and writers that we now have on board have been happy to help us push our project to their networks (and we have slowly been building links ourselves with creators of colour as well), so we’re confident that we can do this. And with more writers of colour, we hope that they’ll push the project to their networks as well, making more actors of colour comfortable with putting themselves forward, so we can push the casting in the direction we want.
But all this has to start on respect, and working hard to make sure that every person we work with is treated with the respect they deserve as creatives and actors. We’re going to work hard on it. Let us know how we do.