money Casting Director Alexis Allen Winter: “We Have Been Vilified For Making Our Process Fit The Current Industry Standard” – Guest Column
Editors note: Alexis Allen Winter began her casting career in North Carolina in 2007 on One Tree Hill, and moved to L.A. in 2012 where she has worked in the offices of Laray Mayfield, Rich Delia, Courtney Bright and Nicole Daniels, Tamara Notcutt, Gail Goldberg and Sheila Jaffe, winning an Artios in 2020 for her work on To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before. Deadline asked her to weigh in on the current autition controversy involving self-tapes and how it is impacting her business.
I, like most of the casting community, have spent time reading over the latest articles on the current state of casting (and the comments on those articles). It has been gut-wrenching to read and try to digest, especially as someone who learned this industry in the Southeast, where self-tapes have been the prominent form of auditions since I started in 2007 working as a casting assistant and in extras casting.
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It leaves me feeling as if I’m in Quantum Leap where in this reality, self-tapes are a brand new idea, and especially happening during the week of the first in-person Artios Awards since 2020.
It feels like our process is mostly misunderstood, because I assume it is. I come from a film and TV background, so I can’t speak for reality, commercial, VO and other casting specialties. However, from my experience, auditions are a very important part of our job, but they are just that: a part. Casting directors have a long and storied, vital part of this industry that has mostly gone thankless and forgotten — as the Oscars just reminded us on Sunday night. Wrap parties that forget to invite us. Articles and press that mention every actor, producer, agent, and manager but fail to give a nod to the casting department attaching those amazing actors that often are the very reason those projects get financing and distribution. It’s worth mentioning that most casting directors are women and/or members of the LGBTQIA+ community. We ourselves are an underrepresented group in the industry, especially at the department head level.
Technology has done a lot of wonderful things for our industry across the board, but has mostly left casting behind. We have a significant lack of software that streamlines our process, which is why a very large part of an assistant and associate duties are manually creating and entering hundreds (usually thousands) of actors into various spreadsheets and tables while we track availability and auditions requested/seen. We spend hours downloading and uploading auditions and self-tapes from one platform to another. We are a department of three people if we’re lucky, but usually two, handling thousands of auditions, spreadsheets, databases, cast lists, deal memos, offers, etc. We are, as one casting professional said, in the middle of a see-saw between actors/agents/managers and production. Our workload has increased, yet we have been vilified for making our process fit the current industry standard to be able to see more actors, which benefits all actors.
We are now expected to (and need to) see between 100-500 actors per role. We physically can not do that in person, nor should we be expected to. We should be allowed to embrace and utilize technology just as every other industry has. It is vital to the process. It is our process, and we should be able to regulate how it best works for us and production, just as every other industry does in their interview process.
Cutting out or reducing the amount of self-tapes does not mean more in-person sessions, it just means less people get auditions. We can only see 30-50 people in person per day. My experience is that in-person auditions arguably cost actors more money and time than self-tapes and require a certain amount of privilege. Any actor who has had to go to Santa Monica at 4 p.m. on a Friday, pay for parking, give up a shift, find a babysitter, to spend 5 minutes in the room would likely agree. And being in the room doesn’t offer any advantage or influence for the large majority of auditions. Actors need to remember that the final choice is not ours, it is producers/directors/executives who have final say and most of the time they make that decision off of — yes — a tape on a link that we send them. Rarely are they meeting anyone in person unless it is a high-level role.
You will never be right for every single role. No one is. It doesn’t mean your audition wasn’t good, and it doesn’t mean we don’t notice you. That’s why the audition is the win, you’re being seen. Turn in a good audition and let it go. If those audition requests keep happening, you can know without a doubt that casting is trying to get you booked. We want to give you as many chances as possible to get in front of producers and directors. We are on your side.
Yes, we do get thousands of submissions and we do watch hundreds of tapes. Do we watch them all? Yes. Do we watch ALL of them all? Not all of the time. If someone is right, they’re right and we can see that right off the bat. If I’m not sure, I skip around to beats where I want to see the choice the actor made. That’s how I gather who is on the right track, and that’s why self-tapes are so vital, because it allows us to meet the demand and keep up with the influx of actors coming into the industry while maintaining our own physical and mental health.
A lot of the discourse appears to be actors viewing all of this as one great competition against each other, which it isn’t. It’s everyone doing uniquely great work and offering themselves as a one-of-a kind solution to a creative opportunity. I personally believe a lot of it is valid anger that the industry is so hard; acting takes a lot of talent but also work, and casting is an easy target for that frustration. I get it. At the end of it, we just need to see your performance. So much pushback seems to be people not believing us when we say: It all comes down to the acting every time. Not the headshot, not the resume, not the reel, not the production quality of your tape, not being in the room, not your slate. It’s the acting, the audition, every single time. And when your acting is in place and you fit the role? It’s so simple it sounds stupid: That’s the magic formula. Everything else is just noise.
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