Casting

Essays

Oct 8

I’ve never understood casting. I was watching a commercial this morning, and the father in the scene had to skip a rock into the water, and there is no chance he had ever skipped a rock. It seems to me that, even if you are selling a stay at a motel chain, the most important part of “acting” when skipping a rock is being able to skip a rock. I don’t think this guy, with zero lines, was THAT good at being a dad that they couldn’t have found someone who could skip a rock.

It’s like when Michael J. Fox played Teen Wolf, or when so many other actors played a character who was the star of the basketball team. We know when you can’t shoot the rock. It will never look right. You either play hoop or you don’t. In Hoosiers, the kid who played Jimmy Chitwood could shoot the rock. He played basketball in real life.

It got me thinking about what we would do if we could cast our lives, like we are just characters in other people’s stories. What if you could cast your barista every time you stop into the neighborhood coffee shop on the corner, where you are usually met with a mix of disdain and disinterest? What would your ideal barista look like?

It’s a Truman Show concept to build a village around yourself. What would your small-town police chief be like? What about your mail person? I like thought experiments, and this one has me thinking. I wonder if everyone that I would cast would remain silent, thereby eliminating the possibility of awkward small talk. I still wouldn’t want to go to parties.

Or what if you made a movie about your life? Who would play you? This is like the death row meal question: inane and insightful at the same time. But maybe I would fall into the same trap as the commercial rock skipper because the first people that I thought of to play me in a movie were people who arguably look like me. Simon Baker, Jamie Oliver (not even an actor). Now I see where casting goes wrong.

How hard can it be to skip a rock, and how important is it to the motel chain ad? To most people, it will never matter nor be noticed. To someone like me, it was a stray dart that missed the dartboard and landed in my left shoulder.