You would never know it by looking at her, but Andrea Kenyon has been a casting director for 45 years. Starting at 18 and learning on the job, she has been in the business for four and a half decades.
Kenyon is that rare bird who has never worked for anyone but herself and figured things out as she went. It’s paid off, as she has her name on nearly 300 movies, TV shows, shorts and other projects. She’s cast two X-Men movies (Days of Future’s Past and Dark Phoenix), numerous TV shows — earning a 2004 Emmy nomination for the TV movie The Reagans — as well as one of the best cast indie films you will ever see, including the 2011 dramedy Barney’s Version, which earned her the first of four Artios Awards, the Casting Society of America’s highest honor (she eventually won in 2022 for The United States vs. Billie Holiday). Kenyon is also delightful and self-deprecating in conversation, making her easy to talk to and a great hang. She spoke with us from her home office in Montreal.
How did you get into casting?
Oh, dear God. I have a very long background in terms of my family history. My dad had an acting school and he was a booking agent, so I was raised around that.
My father happened to be a stand-up comedian and an impersonator, and his New York agent’s secretary was Joan Rivers. My mom was a dancer and worked with comedian Will Mahoney, she was his sidekick at the time. My entire life has aimed me in this direction. They tell me that I crawled to a TV Guide, like a premonition. I don’t know (if that’s true), but I was surrounded by it.
There was still the path to casting itself.
Yes, I worked with my father when he had his acting school and loved everything about actors. Eventually I was looking for something that I could do that wasn’t associated with my father. Looking for a certain sort of independence. I took stock of my skills, and I thought it seemed to match with the description of casting. I was 18 when I started casting extras.
You never apprenticed with anyone? Never worked as an associate or an assistant?
Oh no, I started from zero and taught myself. If I look back at when I called myself a casting director, versus now, it’s almost embarrassing, the difference. From the beginning, I tried to intern with some casting directors in New York, but my father wouldn’t let me go. He said, “New York will chew you up and spit you out,” so I stayed in Montreal. There’s a very vital industry here, and there has been for many, many years.
I’ve been through everything. There was a time in my career when I was the new kid and didn’t have the body of work, and now, thankfully, I’m on the other side of that. It’s a rough life. It’s very similar to an actor’s life in terms of getting the job and being taken seriously and having your contribution acknowledged and respected, but I love it, and there’s nothing else I’d rather be doing.
You seem to have done fairly well over the years.
I can confidently say that I feel like I am a casting director now. I feel like I’m not always fighting that imposter syndrome as they sometimes reference, but it only took 45 years. I enjoy being part of the community. It’s been a pleasure, and to talk to other casting directors is also very exciting.
You’re being self-deprecating, but there had to be a time when you made the transition in your head from pretender to professional.
I joke about it now, but truly along the way, I don’t think I knew what I was doing until I started work on season one of Are You Afraid of the Dark. I did that for seven seasons and that was a huge transition.
It was in working with other casting people, and within the structure of the process, that you get the biggest education. Now they have educational institutions, or programs in universities, and the Casting Society of America, which provides training for their assistants. At the time there was none, so hands-on experience was the only thing.
That show was a pivotal period. I can’t say that there was one moment where I saw a change but just got myself progressively to a point where my instincts were reliable. I speak about it as confidence, but it’s the overall evolution of how I feel about what I do. I do have a very strong instinct for actors and their process and their skills. I think to know how far to go, to know the parameters of exercising your strengths and your power, that is something that’s always growing.
You mentioned working with and learning from other casting directors. I have found that the casting community is incredibly supportive of each other. That’s rare enough in society, but especially in the entertainment business. Why do you think that is?
I can tell you what my experience is, and that the job is very solitary. Especially now, after the pandemic, because we used to have more interaction with our office staff, with the actors, et cetera, and it has always been a bit solitary. We’re not on set. We’re not interacting with everyone. We’re not part of that day-to-day on-set experience.
Find people who understand what you’re up against and your daily grind, or your joys or the challenges. I have such a pleasure talking to another casting director because they get it, the struggles.
Since you brought up actors, I’m curious, do you find that there are common mistakes that actors make in auditions?
You have to qualify whether you’re talking about really good actors or people who think they’re actors. It’s too easy to focus on the people who are not as experienced and talk about what their issues are.
The basic answer, unfortunately, is that oftentimes they don’t realize that we’re there to support them. That we are working together, so they should see us as supportive, and to lean on us in a way, in terms of communication, information and trusting our information. We’ve read the script, we’ve talked to the producers and the director, we have that inside scoop.
With that in mind, what piece of advice or wisdom would you give to someone coming in to audition for you?
Preparation and making decisions and choices. I find that the ones who don’t go much further are the ones who haven’t done their homework. Or, they think the homework is to just memorize lines and to lift them off the page. They’re not thinking about infusing those lines with life.
What they say, how they react to what they say, how others react to what they say, all of these things are affecting them and you need to see that in the process. You need to see it happening. That makes a difference for us. The actor with the ability to observe humanity and to recreate it is truly a gift to us in terms of what we do.
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