David Rapaport and Lyndsey Baldasare Talk Casting for ‘You’ and Share Audition Tips

September 17, 2024 | Neil Turitz
Photo by Zusha Goldin, courtesy of David Rapaport and Lyndsey Baldasare.

Ideally, when you’re partners with someone, you’re also good friends. That describes David Rapaport and Lyndsey Baldasare, two spectacularly successful casting directors who also happen to be, in her words, “best friends.”

They are the brains behind the casting of all of the DC Comics shows you might have seen on the CW, giving actors like Stephen Amell, Grant Gustin, Melissa Benoist and Tyler Hoechlin, just to name a few, the chance to be superheroes. There’s also Gossip Girl, Riverdale, The Summer I Turned Pretty and You (again, that’s just scratching the surface).

Talking to the two of them, it’s clear how close they are, having been partners for about 15 years, and friends for much longer than that. They finish each other’s sentences and follow up on each other’s points, and are just a great amount of fun. The fifth and final season of You drops later this year, and their new medical drama Brilliant Minds, starring Zachary Quinto, premieres on NBC on September 23. They talked to us from their respective home offices — a post-Covid reality — in Los Angeles.

How did you both get into casting in the first place?

Lyndsey Baldasare: I was a theater major at UCLA. I’m the only person in entertainment in my family, so I had no idea what I was going to do after graduation and how to make money and apply what I had studied. I started doing a bunch of internships, and the last one was with a casting director named Mali Finn, who was a big, big, big casting director. That’s how I met David. 

David Rapaport: I also got into casting via an internship. I went to Emerson College in Boston, and one of my internships there was with Kevin Fennessy Casting. One of his assistants had moved out to Los Angeles to work for Mali Finn. When I did my last semester of college in LA under Emerson’s LA program, one of my internships was with Mali, and she ended up hiring me right after it ended. Lyndsey interviewed to be an intern with us, and I was the one who interviewed her. 

LB: David didn’t hire me the first time. 

DR: She came back twice. I think I had forgotten, but I had already met her. 

Is this one of those times when you had the blind date a second time and forgot you had dated the first time?

LB: (Laughs) Yeah. I didn’t forget, though. I took a 50-50 shot that David wouldn’t remember. It was about three months between interviews.

DR: In my defense, there’s a lot of names coming at you, we’re doing a lot of projects, and of course, she had a great resume, but yeah, I didn’t remember. 

LB: I always give him crap about it. 

How did you two end up as partners?

DR: I worked with Mali for five or six years, and then another associate of hers, Lindsey Kroeger, and I, went out on our own. The first big thing that we booked was the Gossip Girl pilot in 2007. Shortly after that, we went our separate ways, and I continued in the business and booked a lot of work, luckily, off the success of Gossip Girl. I called Lyndsey and said, “I need your help.” We’ve been together ever since.

LB: I didn’t work with Mali as long as David had. I was there for a couple of years and then got my MBA, because casting was my first job, and I thought I’d try different things. I worked in finance and contracts for a year or so, and then I realized that was not what I wanted to do. Once I started working in different industries, I realized I missed casting. I think it was nice to have that perspective, because when I came back the second time, I was like, “Oh, this is what I want to do.”

What was it about casting that you missed so much that brought you back?

LB: I think the creativity, the teamwork, especially coming from Mali. David, correct me if I’m wrong, but Mali was kind of the hub for our generation of casting directors. Jennifer Cooper worked there. Deanna Brigidi worked there. Tamara Hunter worked there. Olivia Wilde was our intern.

It was just all these really interesting people that we knew through the business. I missed having that close bond with people, that creativity. So I said, “Okay, now I’ve seen what the other side does. I’ve learned a lot of great skills from my time away, but this is my passion.”

Then your friend David offered you an opportunity and it was a good fit.

LB: Absolutely. It wasn’t too foreign, it was just more about finding out how our partnership worked because it’s like a marriage. It was testing out how different working styles, or what somebody’s taste is, work together.

DR: I agree. It’s totally a marriage in terms of taste. We have very similar tastes, but different interests in the kind of shows we watch. I’m more into YA shows and musical theater and Lyndsey’s more into crime dramas and British TV shows and things like that, but we tend to have the same taste when it comes to actors.

In terms of working together, it’s been a fascinating journey. Despite being really good friends and despite being taught by one of the best casting directors of all time, there was a point in our career, I want to say about five or six years ago, where we were doing 10 shows at once. Although we knew how to cast a show, we looked at each other and said, “Oh.” All of a sudden we’re running a business, and nobody ever taught us how to run a business. 

It’s funny, that doesn’t come up much in my conversations with partners, but the truth is, you’re an entrepreneur, and have to deal with all that goes with it.

DR: Yeah, and there was this huge learning curve. We decided to do two things. One, with all credit to Lindsay, we split our duties. We both have our hands in everything that goes on in the office, but I would say I’m a little bit more in the creative and Lindsay’s a little bit more in the business part of it.

Then we hired a business consultant to come in and do a little “couples therapy” and help us efficiently organize and run what has become a really big business. I think that changed the game for us. We’ve never been happier, our communication has only gotten better and our work with our staff has only gotten better. It was a necessary thing, and it was a huge step in our business together.

LB: Just to piggyback what David said, I think the business consultant also gave us a bigger picture, asking, what is your vision? Where do you want your company to go? How big do you want it to grow? For me, it had always been that work begets work, but to think about the overall picture, and coming up with a plan was a big help.

One of the things I wanted to ask you about was your ability to break new talent. With all those CW shows, I’m curious about the process of breaking that kind of talent, and how that affects your work.

DR: I mean, first and foremost, we’re fans. We’re fans of actors, we’re TV fans and we love discovering talent. That’s what this job is, and that’s what brings us the most joy and excitement. I think we pride ourselves on our ability to spot a quality in somebody, maybe before it’s fully formed.

Lyndsey reminded me the other day that we cast Sydney Sweeney and Lily Collins in some of their first co-star roles in the 90210 reboot. I remember now seeing something in them the way that we did when we cast Pedro Pascal in the Wonder Woman pilot, which never aired. He wasn’t the Pedro Pascal we know now, but there was something fresh and exciting there. 

To me, the opportunity to find people, to dig, to go through that process, that’s what keeps me hungry and motivated. We watch every single tape, every submission ourselves. I think I’m afraid I’m going to miss that one person who has that one thing that’s going to break out, and I’m not gonna be able to talk about them in an interview one day. (Laughs)

That leads me to another question, about the casting of all those superhero shows. I remember very specifically as a comic book geek when Grant Gustin was cast and seeing the trouble you got because Barry Allen in the comic has blonde hair, and Grant’s is brown. I’m curious about dealing with the inevitable fan reaction, as well as the added pressure of people already having an idea of what the character looks like. Seems like a very unique problem to have.

 

DR: I like that question because it sort of evolved. A lot of the stuff that we worked on, whether it be Gossip Girl, The Summer I Turned Pretty, Arrow, The Flash or Riverdale, were adapted from previous material, so a lot of fans already had an idea of what these characters look like, sounded like, things like that. I think our approach to it was that we’re not necessarily making a live-action version of these things. We’re doing a reinvention of these stories. 

For Riverdale, for example, it had the same DNA as the Archie comics, but the vibe, the tone, everything was completely different. We wanted it to have its own life. To me, that’s so interesting, because we get to extend an idea of what a character could be, or who would be casting that character just based on matching an essence of a person to a character, which means you can change age, body type, and ethnicity.

It has allowed us to cast a Latina Veronica on Riverdale, a black Batwoman, a trans superhero [in Supergirl] and things that weren’t necessarily written into the previously existing material, but have allowed us to evolve these characters. You’re never going to make everybody happy. That’s an impossible task. Our job is really to focus and find the best person for the role, essence-wise, Sometimes, that may mean that someone who has blonde hair in a comic book is going to have brown hair on the TV show. 

What piece of advice or wisdom would you give to somebody coming in to audition for you?

DR: When actors are self-taping, I think it’s a great challenge to trust their instincts make a choice, and put something out there. I know that actors aren’t getting scripts anymore because of leaks and things like that, and I know it’s a difficult pill to swallow, but I’m not looking for a perfect audition.

I don’t know what a perfect audition is, because I don’t know exactly what I’m looking for. I want to encourage them to make choices. I encourage people to find their unique selves and put it out there on the tape. When you send it to us, I can promise you either Lindsay or I watch the tape. I know that’s a really difficult feeling, but just keep showing up, keep playing the game, and we’re all in this together.

LB: I think a lot of people sometimes fall into the trap of doing it the way they think that we “want them to do it.” Probably, when we see you, we’ve seen the scene a lot of times, so we want to see what you bring to it. We can tell a good actor, and we remember these people down the line.

I think when you’re auditioning, you’re always auditioning for the next job. I like to say, “keep doing consistent work, and keep being a team player, it all factors in.” I know some actors feel like they’re putting these tapes out and nobody’s watching them, but we are. You’re not gonna get 100% of the jobs you go out for, but if you’re good at what you do, people will find you.

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