Nina Gold has cast three strong contenders competing for film awards this year. The UK casting director talks to Screen about actor choices on those titles and her approach to the highly collaborative profession
Nina Gold is talking to Screen International about her work on various upcoming films and television series, and explaining — in answer to a steady interrogation — how these particular opportunities for her casting company came about. Then she pauses. “This is making me sound like a terrible, old nepotistic person,” she protests. “You know, we have good working relationships and it’s good to keep them going.”
Gold, it is fair to say, has a number of good working relationships, built up over several decades in the industry, working for key UK companies such as Working Title Films and See-Saw, as well as the likes of Lucasfilm, Netflix and HBO. She has won five Primetime Emmys for Game Of Thrones, The Crown and miniseries John Adams, and was Bafta-nominated for The Two Popes.
Her 2022 credits — 11 of them — give an indication of the range of her work, including studio franchise titles Morbius and Jurassic World Dominion, Lucasfilm/Disney+ TV series Andor, See-Saw/Apple TV+ series Slow Horses and four UK independent films launched this year at major fall festivals: Empire Of Light, The Wonder, Allelujah and Catherine Called Birdy. All of the latter quartet except Alan Bennett play adaptation Allelujah — which releases next March — are competing at this year’s Bafta Film Awards, giving Gold three plausible shots at a Bafta nomination in the casting category.
“I really do say no to a hell of a lot more than I say yes to,” says Gold. “All of these people [associated with these films] are people that I really admire, and am friends with. They are important to me.”
Empire Of Light came her way having cast director Sam Mendes’s previous film 1917 — but the relationship with Mendes and his producer partner Pippa Harris at Neal Street Productions goes back much further: Gold cast their 2006 feature Starter For 10, handing Benedict Cumberbatch a key early role.
Gold immediately responded to Mendes’s script for Empire Of Light, which is set in England in 1980-81 at a particular moment in youth culture and race relations. “The whole setting and time resonated with me — and the music,” she explains. She was also drawn to the female protagonist Hilary, finding the character to be “something that felt very lived and authentic”, whose mental illness is “seeded subtly”.
Lead actress Olivia Colman “was already in everyone’s mind” when she boarded the film. “How could she not be? She does seem like the person who would do it the most justice, and boy did she mine the potential of it. Her performance is so truthful and vulnerable.”
In the film, Hilary begins a romance with a much younger man, Stephen, who is a new employee at the cinema where she works — and, as a Black man, also suffers racial prejudice over the course of the drama. “That’s where we could really meet all of the possibilities,” says Gold. “There’s a wealth of young Black actors in their twenties, who are just coming through. We had a lot of interesting, good people to look at. And we did, we looked at a lot of people.”
Mendes was shown actors on tape, Gold met with a number, and then the filmmaker met eight candidates. Micheal Ward, best known for TV’s Top Boy and breakout UK indie film Blue Story, clinched the role. Gold pays tribute to his “star charisma” and the “subtlety of his performance through complex emotional terrain”.
With The Wonder, Chilean director Sebastian Lelio’s adaptation of Emma Donoghue’s 1862-set novel, English nurse Lib comes to rural Ireland to help establish the facts relating to a young Irish girl, Anna, who her family says has not eaten for months, miraculously surviving on God’s grace.
Florence Pugh, who is 26, emerged as a candidate for the role of Lib. “We had quite a lot of debate about whether Florence was too young,” says Gold. “Which, now that you see her performance, you wonder how you could have had a second of question about that. She so owns the part. Sometimes you spend too much time worrying about stuff like age, when in fact it’s about much more than that.”
The role of Anna, who is aged 11, necessitated a big search, undertaken in Ireland by casting director Louise Kiely, but in the end the solution — Kila Lord Cassidy — “was right there under our nose in England”. The young performer is the daughter of English actor Stephen Lord and Irish actress Elaine Cassidy. “She lives in England, but she sounds quite a lot like her mum. She’s certainly got access to the whole Irish side of her heritage,” explains Gold. Elaine Cassidy was then cast as Anna’s mother in the film.
Medieval comedy Catherine Called Birdy — Lena Dunham’s adaptation of a favourite novel by Karen Cushman that she read as a child — likewise involved a big casting search for the lead character, who is aged 14. Gold had in fact shown Dunham a picture of Bella Ramsey at their first meeting, which she had on her phone having cast her in Game Of Thrones.
“We did spend a lot of time double-checking that we were definitely making the right choice by meeting a shedload of other people,” says Gold. “There were also some other good people but Bella just seemed so perfect. The whole film has a Lena Dunham quality — it’s irreverent, subversive and feminist, and also funny and joyful. It’s all of those things that Lena is and this character is, and Bella captures it brilliantly.”
Casting a role like Catherine is a lot of work for Gold and her team — which includes co-casting directors Martin Ware and Lucy Amos, and several assistants — but the process will yield dividends for future projects. “It’s just really great, and necessary, to contemplate new talent,” she explains. “That’s the best bit about our job. We’re all just trying to keep our eyes out everywhere, all the time. For Catherine Called Birdy, boy, did we get out there and look at all the young people. Casting is a constant amassing of knowledge that you’ve got to try and keep in your head forever.”
Gold likens the role of the casting director to “the flesh-and-blood version of building the set or making the clothes but with human beings”, while also being sensitive to the collaborative and guiding — rather than decision-making — nature of the profession. “I’m trying to be the one who has the wide knowledge to bring to the situation,” she explains.
Gold also acknowledges the recent content boom has been great for actors, and the emphasis on existing intellectual property — such as Star Wars or Game Of Thrones — creates opportunities for innovative casting, since the material has already hooked audience interest. More broadly, however, she points out: “Somebody in the financing chain needs to feel like somebody’s going to buy a ticket for more than the reason that it’s just going to be good. Sometimes the marketing team at a studio will want the name, no matter what. I’m much keener to make it right than make it famous, but sometimes that can be a bit of a battle.”
Which is why those sustained relationships — and the level of trust that develops over time — remain so important to Gold. “It’s only when you and the other people, especially the director, can really connect and collaborate and work together to make the good choice, that’s when you develop relationships that carry on,” she says. “That’s when it becomes proper fulfilling creative casting.”
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