MoviesFilm-makers are increasingly putting people off the street into lead roles because they deliver what professional actors sometimes can't: authenticityFor years, fashion scouts have scoured shops and pavements for the next big thing in modelling. Now the practice known as "street casting" is taking hold in cinema, as film-makers hope that actors not schooled in the overtrained mannerisms of the drama school will supply their work with authenticity and realism. Increasingly, unknowns are being discovered sitting in cafes, loitering on housing estates and at The X Factor-style open auditions.
To find actors for Attack the Block, the feature debut of comedian Joe Cornish, casting director Nina Gold headed to housing estates and schools to find teenagers who naturally resembled the characters in the film. "The guy who played more or less the lead boy had it all going on under the surface; he was quite silent and not easily drawn," says Gold. "Another of the actors was always wisecracking and telling jokes, just like the character in the script."
Cornish is a big fan of street casting. "You're casting unknowns because you want an authenticity that a professional actor may in fact find it harder to give; you want their realness," he says. "They told us as much about the script as we could tell them. They advised us on costume, on language; we used them as a kind of resource to make sure the film was credible to people of their age."
Recent examples of successful street casting include Conor McCarron (who stars in Neds) and Katie Jarvis (Fish Tank). Plucked from obscurity and thrown straight into lead roles, they offer captivating portrayals of the complexities of youth without any prior training or even demonstrable inclination to act. Casting director Des Hamilton, renowned for discovering This Is England's Thomas Turgoose, has a lot of experience recognising potential talent. His latest discovery was young Samuel Bottomley, who appears in Paddy Considine's directorial debut, Tyrannosaur. "He just didn't care," Hamilton says of the casting session. "He came in, sat down and shot the breeze – it was much the same conversation as with Thomas back in the day. He had the right look and a tremendous natural ability to translate what Paddy asked of him."
Street casting isn't limited to brassy young teens with grit in their nails and a "whatever" attitude. Hamilton has just cast Andrea Arnold's adaptation of Wuthering Heights. "It was the first time I ever did it outside the genre of edgy, working-class drama," Hamilton says.
Arguably the furthest street casting has been pushed is in the work of Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy, the makers of Helen and the short film collection Civic Life; they source all their actors from locations in which they are shooting. "We were interested in what that engagement brought to art," says Lawlor. "For us, the final results of any project are inextricably tied up in the processes. If your process is fairly conventional, then you get that. The process we go through is more unusual and inevitably the end result is quite unusual. That's what stands out."
Film sets, though, can be daunting places; Lawlor and Molloy work hard on how to engage with non-professional actors. "The main thing is to shut up, not to overload them with information and to relax people," says Lawlor. "When we ask someone who's never acted before to walk into a room, what's required from them is just to perform it. If you start tampering with someone's natural walk, they'll be over-conscious of it and they'll try to act. Then you've lost it altogether."
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