“To Be Me” web series creator Amanda Dash is adaptable. She started her career as a dancer in NYC, but when an injury forced her to stop, she quickly found work on “The Tonight Show” and “Entertainment Tonight,” as well as working as a producer and composer’s assistant on Broadway before moving into casting. She relocated to Los Angeles and started working on “The Bachelor” and “The Bachelorette” with Daan Jansen before the two began collaborating on “To Be Me.” The casting producer spoke to Backstage about moving from reality into the scripted space.
Write what you’re passionate about.
When you create work around your passions, it will attract talent. “We wanted to create something that could bring change not only in Hollywood but to our world as a whole. I’ve always been very passionate about equality, especially the LGBTQIA community,” Dash says.“We wanted to hit on something that is underrepresented by showing a raw and authentic story, without all the glitz and glam.” Production on the series, which is about a young, Midwestern African-American struggling with gender identity, gained momentum when Emmy Award Winner Kim Estes joined the project to play the father figure.
Casting scripted isn’t so different from reality.
Although “To Be Me” is a scripted project, the casting process wasn’t too different from what Dash is used to. “For reality TV, I’m not looking to fill a specific role or part but find people that will fit the show who can be their own personality and character.” Typically, for a scripted project, you have to fill a specific part. For “To Be Me” Dash and Jansen really wanted actors who could relate to the material. “I think it is so important to have actors connect on a personal level with characters for scripted work,” Dash says. They wanted to make sure they cast actors “who would be comfortable telling us if there was something wrong with what we wrote. We didn’t want to exaggerate or glamorize the story. We wanted to create a story the cast would have a voice in.” In fact, one of the supporting characters was written for Corey Rae, one of the series’ writers, who is a trans woman.
Finding the lead was challenging because Dash wanted to find an actor who identified either as non-binary or a trans female, but “the character we wrote had not gone through any form of transition yet. So, if we found a trans female who was fully presenting as a woman, we would have to ask her to go back in time to essentially play a boy.”
Make your voice heard.
They initially held auditions with the help of Ann Thomas, who runs a talent agency strictly for trans performers. While they found some amazing talent, they didn’t find the lead they were looking for, so they turned to Backstage and Instagram to take the search national. “We knew exactly what we wanted, but we just didn’t know how to find it,” she says. They narrowed it down to two actors, one from Backstage and Kate Rose Wilburn, a nonbinary trans female from New Jersey who they found on Instagram. Wilburn was cast because of how well Wilburn’s story related to the character. “Kate fit the character in every way. They fully identify as a nonbinary trans female yet has not gone through any form of transition yet. Kate identified with the script in a way none of the [other] actors we saw or talked with could. It was as though we wrote Kate’s story. Kate is giving a voice to those who feel voiceless. We want to make sure anyone in the community who wants to have a voice gets a chance to be heard.”
“To Be Me” will premiere later this year on tobemewebseries.com.
Check out Backstage’s Los Angeles audition listings!
