Casting Directors

Here is how the work lines up. New York is one of the two great talent capitals on earth. Juilliard, Tisch School of the Arts, the Actors Studio, Stella Adler, and HB Studio feed forty-plus Broadway houses, hundreds of Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway venues, and the SAG-AFTRA Local 1 and Actors' Equity rosters — and our casting directors work that ecosystem at the level Avy Kaufman (Lincoln, Spotlight, Brokeback Mountain), Ellen Lewis (Scorsese's career-long collaborator), Sheila Jaffe (The Sopranos, The Marvelous Mrs.

Here is how the picture comes together. Maisel), Cindy Tolan, Bernard Telsey (theater-and-film crossover through Telsey + Firm), Douglas Aibel (the Wes Anderson roster), and Henry Russell Bergstein have set as the NYC standard. Our network reads principal, day-player, recurring, and background as one pipeline — submissions flow from CAA, WME, UTA, Paradigm, Gersh, Innovative Artists, and the boutiques in Soho and Midtown. Auditions hold at Ripley-Grier, Pearl Studios, and casting suites in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Long Island City. Chemistry reads and callbacks slot in around Broadway eight-show weeks and prestige-series shoot days at Steiner, Silvercup, Kaufman Astoria, and Wildflower. NYC's diversity is the asset other markets cannot match. Spanish, Mandarin, Korean, Russian, Yiddish, Haitian Creole, Arabic, and dozens more bilingual actor lists are live, not theoretical.

Here is what we have to work with. Process-wise, we run a clean briefing-to-booking flow: character notes and tone refs in week one, agency picks and self-tapes against the schedule the showrunner or director needs, callbacks lined up with EST overlap so London and LA producers can join live, and SAG-AFTRA and AEA deals agreed to fair terms with full New York State Film Tax Credit (up to 30%, with the Empire State Production Credit and post-prod add-on) compliance on principal and background spend.

Here is the layout. Background and crowd casting runs through Grant Wilfley Casting, Sylvia Fay, and Central Casting NY against AD-team weekly counts, with specialty picks — period authenticity for Gilded Age and Mrs. Maisel-style work, dancers from Alvin Ailey, Paul Taylor, and Broadway, stunts via UPM-cleared coordinators, musicians and Yiddish-theater pros — already in our database. We hold MOME permit and Local 1 lineup tight on shoot days, route deals through the production legal team for SAG-AFTRA contract finalization, and surface theater stars and emerging Broadway talent the LA-only casting pools never see.