Casting! Casting!

During the early bits of Summer 2022, Joseph and I released a casting call on Breakdown Services for our first feature film, “Strange Kindness”. 

I was an old friend of Breakdown Services as a couple-decades-long follower as an actor and the website hasn’t changed much over that time, something that’s quite charming. I understood how a casting call worked but I had never been the one to publish a call. Joseph, not being an actor or a casting director, had no experience with Breakdown Services at all, so needless to say, we both entered into this stage of filmmaking pretty green. 

Which, in my opinion, was just fine. 

We published the post on May 19th after going through a vetting process (a step that was quite comforting). 

And then we waited. Anxiously. 

And the number of submissions started to grow. 

And grow.

And grow! And by the beginning of June we had over 1,500 submissions for THE YOUNG MAN alone. 

I’ll backtrack a little bit and say that we decided to post this casting call because one of the characters in particular, was someone we couldn’t quite picture. We knew the qualities he needed to have, the depth, the mind, but beyond that, we wanted to be shown something about this character which is why THE YOUNG MAN in particular became the focus during casting. We were thinking about the other characters also, but finding THE YOUNG MAN felt like the piece that would unlock the rest. 

Joseph and I began going through the submissions. We started by reviewing each person, scrolling through their photos, watching their reel, maybe seeing if they were on instagram. Through that process, we were able to narrow the 1500+ submissions down to about 25 people who we sent sides to (a scene from the script) and asked them to self tape.

It was during this phase that Joseph and I had a lot of conversations where we asked each other questions like, “Is this ok?”, “Is this really how we do this?”, “Is it okay to ask them to do this for us?”. Because it is a lot to ask of someone. We are sending them something to memorize, think about, tape, and then send back to us. All without being paid or knowing whether or not they’ll get the job. I love auditioning and I think this part is the fun part. Auditions are usually a place where I get to play the most but I’m not going to lie by saying that this system is ideal. Compensation would ideally be exchanged for time. But, this is how it’s done so we played along.

It helped us a lot that of the 25 people who we asked to self tape, a lot of them responded in an extremely enthusiastic way.

After the first round of self-tapes, we asked 4 of those people to do a Zoom Audition with us.  

Again we were met with enthusiasm and willingness. 

And those four auditions from those four actors were incredible. 

If you looked at them all on paper, it’d be pretty confusing. There was no one type represented. Literally, every single person was the opposite of the one before. When we would have an audition, Joseph and I would walk the loop afterwards and do a little debriefing. Talk about what worked, what didn’t worked, who we were leaning towards. After the 4, we got it down to 2 people. 

Our decision was hard. We were left with two actors who offered us different directions, were both equally invested and talented and lovely, and our choice came down to what story we were trying to tell.

And with that, we were able to cast someone. 

He was the person who stuck with us the most and the person that gave both of us that feeling in our gut. He had shown us something about the character that Joseph and I wanted to learn more about. 

And with that on July 2nd we offered the role of THE YOUNG MAN to Michal Vondel and it’s been magic ever since.