Hollywood’s Unwritten Rules
A top casting director on making movies in the age of cancel culture
Nearly everyone watches movies and television series, but the process that brings moving-picture art and entertainment to screens often remains opaque. Actors receive most of the acclaim, and for obvious reasons.
They’re the most obvious representation of the film. And they’re the ones audiences connect with. But how did the actors in your favorite movie get there in the first place?
Casting directors play an enormous, yet often under-appreciated, role in the creative process. When actors shine, when they fit well with the project and with the rest of the cast, what we’re noticing is the handiwork of a casting director.
But casting directors’ contributions extend far beyond the creative side.
As the culture wars rage, producers and execs rely on them to navigate an increasingly perilous landscape where lawsuits, boycotts, social media backlash, and box office failure loom large.
And their ranks are small.
Casting directors represent an exclusive group—there are only about 350 of them in the United States. And recently my wife/producing partner, Courtney Moorehead Balaker, and I interviewed one of the most accomplished members of that small group.
As a VP of casting at Paramount Studios, Monika Mikkelsen oversaw the casting of many titles including Top Gun: Maverick, various installments of the Mission: Impossible franchise, 10 Cloverfield Lane, and The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run.
Although she has cast many studio blockbusters, Monika’s heart remains in the indie world.
As an independent casting director, Monika has cast dozens of films including Courtney and my Little Pink House starring Catherine Keener and Jeanne Tripplehorn, The Cleaner starring Samuel L. Jackson and Eva Mendes, Learning to Drive starring Ben Kingsley and Patricia Clarkson, The Face of Love starring Annette Bening and Ed Harris, and The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby with Jessica Chastain and William Hurt.
Recently, Monika cast Paramount Pictures’ Smile (2022) starring Sosie Bacon and Kyle Gallner and the Netflix animated miniseries Oni: Thunder God’s Tale (2022) starring Momona Tamada and Craig Robinson.
Courtney and I asked Monika about the unwritten rules of casting, the state of free expression in Hollywood, and how a culture of fear affects the quality of on-screen art.
What are your thoughts on the current state of free expression in the industry?
I think there's a sense that someone's listening, and there's a nervousness to that. And everyone's really careful with how they speak or are perceived. I feel like there's definitely a big brother vibe to it.
Am I being recorded? Am I being filmed? Does someone know something? Is this a trick question? There's always nervousness around conversations that are demanding an opinion.
So how does it come up in your line of work then when people might be a little squeamish about saying something?
Well, I've seen it change. I mean, I'm 53 and I started when I was 20 or 19. I was an intern in college. So conversations have changed and become very politically correct as I've grown older, and it's gotten very specific in the last, I'd say eight, nine years. It's notable, it has changed remarkably.
And as a casting director, I'm looking for actors to play a part so I'm asking someone who doesn't necessarily have the life experience to go and play a character whose life experience is specific. And that actor then has to go and portray that role.
Daniel Day Lewis, very famously, in My Left Foot played a character that was a real person and he did not have the disability that the character did. That's not acceptable anymore.
The community of that disability, for example, might rise up and say, “How dare you not cast an actor with that specific disability to play this role. We'd like to see ourselves represented on film!”
And certainly I have done a ton of work with actors with disabilities and I believe 100% that they should be on screen all the time reflecting the world in which we walk.
But I'm also asking for an actor of great talent to portray the character and not be judged for playing that character because they did a great audition and deserve to play the part. Like they're well-trained actors, pretending to be a character. So I get a little stuck in that.
When I grew up, I saw actors with disabilities on screen. We had Fantasy Island. We had cousin Jerry. We had actors with disabilities that simply were people.
They weren't cast to portray a disability. They were cast because they were interesting actors. And they brought with them in their backpack, a cool different thing, which was dwarfism or something else.
So now it's a really strange time because I'm watching actors get yelled at. There's a woman who was called out for not being black enough to play an African American woman. And she was the producer and creator of the project and she wanted to do this job and she was like, “I'm gonna make this happen because I'm ginormously famous!”
Zoe Saldana is her name.
And she got this movie [Nina] made and then the community was like, “How dare she play this character, she's not black enough!”
Excuse me. What? Because, like, who grades that?
If it's a character who's a paraplegic, it's the paraplegic community. If it's a gay character, it's the gay community. If it's a trans character, it's the trans community.
It just depends on the subject. I mean, and there are characters that can hit seven different communities and insult seven different communities all at once. And it becomes this conversation that's incredibly exhausting, because I don't want to only cast an actor in a disability role that has a disability that's written for the disability that then becomes the spokesperson for the disability.
They're a human being that happened to have a disability. That's it. Like why can't they just be a lawyer?
Right? Why is it that we have to make them these spokespeople?
So I just stay real quiet because I don't want to get policed either. I have to be sure that I'm employed by myself, and then I can speak freely because then I'm paying myself and I'm representing myself. But if I'm representing a company, they're like, “Shut the fuck up!”
But do you think that that that “shut the fuck up” is coming from artistic choices or because that's what they think they're supposed to believe?
They're risk averse.
If you're casting for a corporation, they're really risk averse and they don't want any bad publicity. So like when the fans of Superman freaked out because British actor Henry Cavill was cast but he’s not American… literally, and my favorite thing was we went to a casting meeting and the casting director in charge of that movie was like, “Yeah, Superman is from Krypton!’ (Laughter)
When I was at Paramount, we worked on a movie about American paratroopers flying into a French countryside where there was being specifically bombed that happened to have a doctor working on a zombie cure to keep the Nazi soldiers alive. So, we cast an African American actor to play one of the paratroopers, and everyone flipped out.
We had to have several meetings about it because it was like, well, there weren't any black paratroopers in World War II. Okay, but they're also weren't zombies. (Laugher)
But we're gonna take a little creative license. Because it's a movie.
When different groups complain that the person isn't black enough or, you know, they say that their group isn't being represented, do the decision makers assume that the activists represent the group that they say they represent?
Because in reality that may or may not be true.
No one is checking. No one is checking.
So when they hear the activists, they assume like, “Oh, every black woman must believe that because this group says so.”
Yes, because they're gonna go with the worst-case scenario because they're checking with the lawyers and the lawyers are going, “What's gonna cost the studio less money?”
How would it cost them money? What are they worried about?
People won’t go see the movie.
It'll be boycotted, people will literally not see the movie.
So if they're scared of boycotts what would be their worst fear that's actually happened?
I think Ghost in the Shell did very poorly because activists were effectively telling everyone, “Don't see it. It sucks.”
I think that was more of the director's fault. I don't know that it had to do with Scarlett Johansson playing a robot that wasn't Japanese enough.
Oh, that that was the controversy?
Yeah, but I think it's really easy to point at, “Oh, well, the protesters got really mad. So that's why the movie failed.” Rather than it was not a good film.
It seems like most boycotts don't work, so I'm a little confused why they care so much.
If you're having trouble remembering a few movies that were clearly derailed by boycotts and this other one might have just been a bad movie, it just seems like the executives are more fearful than the actual threat warrants.
Is that right or am I wrong?
Yes. I think you're absolutely right. I think that those executives are very fearful of losing their jobs and being held accountable for something.
Do you ever speak up in uncomfortable situations?
I was on a committee with a group of casting directors that focused on diversity in casting. Someone spoke up, that the diversity and inclusion committee should be called the equity committee. It was just a play on words.
But because this very young, very new casting director was deeply offended that we hadn't been doing enough equity work. And I finally just had to stand up for myself and be like, dude, I'm 53 years old. I don't know what you're talking about.
I'm doing what I can and if I don't know something, I would like to learn it and if you're in a position to teach me, then how about you teach me rather than insult me? I'm here. I'm ready for the conversation. Let's have it.
And he was like, “I just feel really like there's an aggressive energy coming from you. I mean, I just really feel like you're not hearing me.”
And I'm like, “I'm not. So how about you change your tact and explain to me what you'd like to do now.”And he was just like, all put upon, but at least I got to speak up for myself in that place.
I’m the first to admit it; I'm totally ignorant. I'm a fat white woman in her 50s. I couldn't be more invisible. So I'll tell you what. Give it to me. What am I missing? And he just was like, “huh?”
Could he articulate it?
No he ended up just backtracking and saying sorry.
Did you hear anything from anyone else in the meeting? Support or criticism?
Yeah. It was all backchannel. No one in any official capacity would speak up.
No one publicly supported you? It was all backchannels?
Yeah, there's just silence and awkwardness when I spoke up.
But is it fair to say that the back-channel stuff you heard was positive towards you speaking up? They supported you?
Well, yeah. The ones that were calling me were like, “Oh, I'm so glad you said something. He's so annoying.”
I would love to know your thoughts just on the creative side of things. Because as a director, I actually do take issue with someone telling me who I'm allowed to cast as opposed to me casting the best person for the role.
So would you agree that creatively we're probably not going in the right direction?
100 percent. It's really frustrating that we can't we can't just cast the best actor anymore.
So tell us about some of the unwritten rules of casting.
The big one is people of color in the movies can't be the bad guys or the weak people. Or the servants or the drug addicts. With each script with each breakdown, you're like, okay, so let's just look at this.
I remember there was one producer I worked for who said, “But there is diversity. There are lots of women in the movie.” (Laughter)
Do minority actors ever get mad about that? Because it seems like you're just kind of taking roles away from them.
And you know, some of these are the most fun roles you could have. Everybody wants to be a bad guy.
Correct. Yeah, I know.
Does that happen?
It literally happens before the casting begins because they're like, no, no, no, we don't want to see any people of color.
But they're taking opportunities away from people of color.
Right. Because they don’t want to insult them.
Right, so give them less work, so they won't get insulted. Got it.
There you go.
How does this new climate affect the quality of art?
It dumbs it down. You're not challenged on any level.
You're not put in a space where you're uncomfortable. Even if you have unconscious biases against something or someone, you can't even face that in the safety of a movie seat because it's already been pre edited out. You can't be challenged.
They take away any edge. So they're making that, what's it called? Pablum? It's just easy to digest like a McDonald's hamburger. You can eat it from zero to 99 because you don't need teeth to chew it. (Laughter)
It's just easy food. And it's tasteless.
Ted Balaker is a filmmaker, and former network newser and think tanker. His recent work includes Little Pink House starring Catherine Keener and Jeanne Tripplehorn, Can We Take a Joke? featuring Gilbert Gottfried and Penn Jillette, and a soon-to-be-released feature documentary based on the bestselling book, The Coddling of the American Mind, by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt.
Great discussion for someone who recently began talking before audiences about films. FYI re Black paratroopers check out the 555th Regiment, aka “The Triple Nickle”, who never jumped into combat but became the first “smokejumpers” parachuting into remote areas to fight forest fires during World War II.