Casting Legend Gregory Apps Talks Getting Started in Casting, Wisdom for Actors Coming to His Audition Room

July 11, 2024 | Neil Turitz
Photo courtesy of Gregory Apps.

You can’t work in an industry for more than four decades and not become something of a legend. Gregory Apps is no exception.

The Australian casting director came to the craft like many of his colleagues in that he sort of fell into it, but once he found his calling, he excelled. Through the decades, he has helped to make a bevy of Australian actors into bona fide stars while also teaching a generation of younger actors how to audition and how to create characters.

Apps is not slowing down either. He’s got several new movies coming out, the first of which is Take My Hand, a romantic drama starring one of his discoveries, Radha Mitchell, which will hit theaters at the end of the summer. He spoke to us from his home Down Under, just outside of Byron Bay, in the Northern Rivers.

How did you get into casting?

I’d been an actor for five or six years, and I’d come to the end of my patience with it. Straight out of high school, before I got my offers for university, I was offered a lead in a feature film or a regular in a TV series. So it’s like, “Hey, acting is great!”

I did that, but what I found is five, six years later, I’m still sitting in the same waiting rooms opposite the same actors going through the same sorts of roles. I was looking for a job and I saw an ad in the paper for the casting director of the ABC, Australian Broadcasting Company, and hey, they gave me the job. 

Wait, they just gave an out-of-work actor with no experience the top casting job at a broadcasting company?

They said no one with casting experience applied! You’ve got to remember, I’m talking the early ‘80s. Casting was very much in its infancy. Melbourne didn’t have a casting office. There wasn’t a pool of experienced casting directors. 

Necessity becomes the mother of invention, so to speak.

 

I mean, let’s face it, how did I hear about this job? There was an ad in the paper! (Laughs) But the beauty of doing that job first, as a casting director, was the fact that they did high-quality drama. Therefore, actors wanted to be at the ABC.

I got my first choice every time. I was able to work at the highest level of the industry, good quality scripts, good quality productions and top actors, and then, after three years at ABC, I went out on my own and became freelance.

I always regard Sydney as like LA. It’s glossy. It’s fun. It’s sexy. Melbourne is more comedy, character, and theater, more like New York. What a great place to be a casting director. More importantly, the late ‘80s was the renascence of the Australian film industry. It’s when people like Ben Mendelsohn, Russell Crowe, all of those actors were coming up.

It’s funny you mention those guys because there’s a long list of actors who, the first time a lot of Americans saw them, were in productions that you cast. I’m curious about that sense of discovery, and if there’s a sense of proprietorship over their careers because they succeeded after you picked them.

Interestingly enough, the film Proof won best film at our Oscars in the early ‘90s. Best Film, Best Actor, Best Script, Best Director, blah, blah, blah. The lead actor was Hugo Weaving. All the casting directors loved him, so, therefore, he always played romantic leads.

Proof was the first time he played a dark character, a sinister character, a la The Matrix or V for Vendetta, that kind of thing. But there’s a young character in it. Four of us sat in a room, the producer, the writer-director, me and my assistant, and we were saying, “Who do we go with?” Russell Crowe? Or Ben Mendelsohn? The director and I said Russell Crowe and the assistant and the producer said Ben Mendelsohn because Ben had a real body of work at that time. He was the expected person for the role, but this young Russell Crowe was refusing to be ignored. Russell got the part, and then it was two years later, we’re sitting with a different team for Romper Stomper, and again we’re saying, “Ben Mendelsohn or Russell Crowe?” That’s an embarrassment of riches. 

Do you have, throughout your extensive career, a favorite film or a high point that you look at and say, “This was the peak?”

Not really. It’s been a great journey. I’ve had a full-time career as an actor and casting director since ’73, and when you get to work in an industry you love for that period, I thank God or whoever that I’ve been able to do that.

When I started casting, the fax machine hadn’t been invented, and neither had the computer or the mobile phone. When we sent out a breakdown to the agents, it went out in an envelope. With a stamp. (Laughs) When we set out the sides, they were sent out in an envelope. With a stamp. It took weeks to organize a casting session.

What piece of advice or wisdom would you offer to an actor coming to audition for you?

That the script is not the priority, the character is the priority. Do improvised versions of the scene before you start learning the lines. What you’re doing is, you’re starting to let the character evolve.

You want the character to feel like a comfortable pair of slippers. A comfortable cloak that you put on, and you do that before you learn the lines before you prioritize the dialogue, before you prioritize the delivery. When you learn a script, you don’t learn the script, you learn the delivery. I see actors in my room, and what they do is, they’ll do two or three different versions, and they’ll have the same beats and rhythms and sequences in lines. Why? Because they’ve learned the delivery, they haven’t learned the character.

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