It’s hard enough to bring a script’s comedic voice to the screen successfully through casting, but it adds an extra challenge when the people you cast have to evoke a sense of place. That’s what casting team Cody Beke and Seth White have built their joint résumé on: a list of series that depict a comedic yet realistic New York City. The NYC-based duo has been behind the ensembles of a new generation of comedies in the last decade, including “Broad City,” “Master of None,” “Difficult People,” “The Last O.G.,” and “Search Party.” This year, their collaboration with Awkwafina on her semi-autobiographical comedy, “Awkwafina Is Nora from Queens” hit Comedy Central with a cast of recognizable talent from within and outside the comedy world. The team says they love a challenge when it comes to finding actors off the beaten path, and they shared how they worked with Awkwafina and where exactly they look when a very specific casting assignment crosses their desk.
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What was the casting process like for “Awkwafina Is Nora from Queens”?
Cody Beke: We came on after they did the first pilot, and Lori Chinn, BD Wong, and Bowen [Yang] were already cast. That was such a great jumping-off point because Lori is hilarious and BD is a legend and we’ve known Bowen since 2015 when we cast him on “Broad City.” It was so exciting to work with him again. Then we got to build everything up with our New York characters and some fun guest casting along the way.
How does getting that authentic New York feel factor into casting?
CB: We really subscribe to shows where New York can kind of be a supporting character. That’s where we really have fun with what we do, bringing the insanity and beautifulness of the city to life. We always have fun with the kind of shows where we can exploit all the eccentricities that the city has to offer.
Seth White: It was a pocket of New York so we really had to explore. We were dealing with elderly, Korean-speaking women and all these people that speak fluent Mandarin throughout the season. It was cool to be able to dig into that.
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If you’re casting people without much experience in acting or in comedy, what indicates that they can hold their own with these comedy legends?
SW: In terms of the audition process, you kind of get the feel for that. We try to mess around with people in the room a little bit and see what they can do with the adjustments. Maybe we throw too many adjustments at them and see how they take it. If Nora goes off the rails, are they going to follow her and keep everything going?
“The comedy community here is so dense and always changing because people will at some point end up moving so it’s always a new crop of young folks coming in every three, four years. It’s fun to watch those people grow and get bigger and funnier.”
What makes this project different for you?
CB: We haven’t done something that [has] been semi-autobiographical and this really was a chance to help Nora bring elements of her personal story to the screen. I think that was exciting for Seth and myself. For a lot of these roles, it was important to cast actors who were close to the real-life counterpart of the people from her own life. That was something new for us, and it was fun to explore casting to real life. We’ve done shows like “Master of None” or “Broad City” where it’s the altered versions of the real-life people, but the story itself, in this case, parallels a lot of the real-life experiences that Nora had when she was growing up in New York, in Queens.
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What were some of the challenges that came with the casting process?
CB: With Lori’s character, in particular, filling out her role and her crew of women of a certain age who speak fluent Mandarin. Alternatively, there’s a casino episode in particular where we had to cast Korean-speaking actresses and there was sort of like a “West Side Story” riff in that episode. There’s not a tremendous pool of professional actors that check off all those boxes so it was fun. We’ve done a lot of non-traditional casting in other projects, but not this particular demographic. It was a change to have our office walk into senior centers in Flushing and cast outside of the box. I don’t know if we ended up casting anyone from any of the senior centers, but they got pretty far in the process. That part is always fun, when you think of new and different ways to find real people that fit the role you’re looking for.
SW: And there were great roles for types that don’t get a lot of great roles often. We’ve got Wai Ching Ho and Ruth Zhang playing Lori’s friends in that episode and they’re both so funny in the episode and just awesome getting to see those people getting to shine a little bit.
CB: When you can give an actor that traditionally has maybe a line or two in a “Law and Order” episode something that can showcase the talent and the sense of humor and comic timing that they have, it’s always nice. This show provided a lot of instances where we got to do that.
Where have you looked to cast non-traditional roles?
CB: For a show like “Master of None” there was huge outreach into pockets in New Jersey and Queens that have not only a large East Indian-American population but also we needed people to speak Tamil, which is a dialect in India that even in India not many people speak. It was very difficult and we did a lot of research and we reached out to private schools, music studios—anywhere we could think of that would have children of the right age to fill out some of these roles. What we love about the shows that we work on in general is getting to tap into the New York comedy community. Improv actors, comedians, some of whom were not even represented at the time, bringing them into the fold and giving them a spotlight and an opportunity. We get to see a show and say, “I saw this really interesting guy and I think we should bring him in and have him do something.” Then that person ends up being a Bowen Yang. There’s been a lot of instances where we’ve gotten to do that and that’s been rewarding.
SW: The comedy community here is so dense and always changing because people will at some point end up moving so it’s always a new crop of young folks coming in every three, four years. It’s fun to watch those people grow and get bigger and funnier.
What advice do you have for actors hoping to get cast in an on-screen comedy someday?
SW: My answer to this is always changing because the world is changing indefinitely. [I’ve seen] people doing front-facing Twitter videos and getting big numbers off of these and then you’re just like, Oh wow, these people are super funny. And you can try to go that way. Ultimately, it’s just practice and getting in a group, making content, being funny, getting some face time, and working out your [material] constantly. You can grow that way and it’s great.
Improv vs. standup: do you have to choose?
“We work with actors that might throw anything at a guest star or co-star at any moment and we need to make sure that the people we’re putting around them are able to hang and elevate the dialogue.”
What would you hope an actor can expect from auditioning for you?
SW: No matter what, we want them to walk out feeling like they brought their best audition to us. The audition process is weird. We want you to be able to have two, three takes. We want you to try to find how you can make a scene funny because we brought you in for a reason, to make it funny. We want people to walk out feeling, at the very least, good about what they did.
Cody Beke: It’s so much easier to say, “Just be comfortable. Just be yourself.” But there are so many other variables that go into an audition that make those words empty. Ultimately, we almost entirely work in comedy, which is fun. We want actors to come in and be relaxed and have fun and be collaborative. We always push an actor to make the material their own. Don’t change it, don’t go off script and ad-lib and rewrite everything. There’s a big difference between doing that and making it your own, doing your own version of whatever the scene is. That’s something we always try and steer the talent to when they come to our office. If they want to keep it loose and change the wording around here and there to make it work better for who they are, that’s something we always encourage. We work with actors that might throw anything at a guest star or co-star at any moment and we need to make sure that the people we’re putting around them are able to hang and elevate the dialogue. It’s something we’re always aware of. Sometimes Seth and I throw an ad-lib at an actor that’s not on the stage and see how they handle it and how they roll with it and if it’ll throw them off because it’s important that actors can roll with the punches.
What misconceptions have you run into that actors have about what you do as a casting director?
CB: I feel great when an actor comes in and we’ll go through an audition and after we’re done, the first thing that comes out of their mouth is, “That was a lot more fun than I expected it to be.” The audition process, inherently, is a scary process. And it can be intimidating. It’s something we’re aware of, and as Seth said, we try hard to keep the audition and the experience as fun and as loose as possible. In general, I want it to be a collaborative, positive, fun experience for the actor.
SW: We want you to get the part as much as you want to get it. We want a role to get cast by someone who nails it, and we want you to come in and nail it. Then we can all go home and be happy.