If there’s one habit we try to break clients and young directors of early, it’s this: never cast someone based on a headshot alone.
A headshot really doesn’t tell you much. Is this person 25 or 40 in real life right now? Blonde or brunette today? Talent doesn’t always keep their photos current, so a headshot can genuinely mislead you. And even a perfectly accurate one tells you nothing about the things that actually matter for a commercial: someone’s comedic timing, how they carry themselves on camera, their presence, the way they deliver a line.
The fix is simple. Always ask for a self-tape. Even a rough one, shot on a phone against a plain wall, tells you more about who a performer actually is than a polished headshot ever could.
We also try to go deeper than a basic casting brief when we’re looking for talent. A script will usually give you a role like “Desk Agent, late 20s” and not much else. We’ll take that and build it out into an actual character with a point of view. Something like “deadpan with warmth, think a specific well-known actor doing customer service, overly intense but trying hard to seem chill.” That kind of direction gives an actor real material to bring to their audition or self-tape, and it tends to elevate the final performance, even for someone who’s only on screen for two seconds in a thirty second spot.
Chemistry matters more than most people expect, especially when you’re casting people meant to play a relationship: a couple, siblings, coworkers. We’ll often put finalists in a room together, even a virtual one, before locking a decision, because how two people play off each other can matter more than how technically skilled either one is individually. And whenever the schedule allows for it, we push for callbacks. That’s really where directing starts. Giving someone an adjustment and seeing whether they can take it and run with it tells you more about how a shoot day with them will actually go than anything else in the process.
Early in my career I made the mistake plenty of directors make: casting mostly on look and vibe, assuming any gaps in performance could get fixed on set. Sometimes that works. Most of the time, on a real commercial schedule, there simply isn’t time to direct someone into a performance they didn’t already have in them. Better to find that out in a callback than in the edit bay.
