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Photo by Beniamino Finocchiaro, courtesy of Armando Pizzuti.
Casting , Filmmaking , The Daily Roundup

‘Here After’ Casting Director Armando Pizzuti Talks Switching from Acting to Casting, Working from Brazil During COVID


September 19, 2024

Armando Pizzuti might not be a name you recognize, but if you’ve seen a movie or TV show that takes place in Italy in the last few years, there is a pretty good chance he helped cast it. Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning, The Art of Racing in the Rain, Ferrari, The Decameron, it’s an impressive list, and it keeps getting longer.

The casting director is more than just Italian movies. He’s built an impressive international career that includes films and TV shows filming all over the world, including the Middle East-set Stolen Girl, with Kate Beckinsale and Scott Eastwood, set for a 2025 release. More immediately is the supernatural horror flick Here After, starring Connie Britton and Freya Hannan-Mills, which hits theaters September 13. He spoke to us from his home in Rome.

How did you get into casting in the first place?

I started as an actor, and I did it for 10 years. One day, my agent at the time told me the director Paulo Sorrentino’s team was looking for a casting assistant who could speak English for this new project that he was about to do. It was The Young Pope, with Diane Keaton and Jude Law. I went there and spoke with the casting director, and they hired me to be a casting assistant for this TV show.

It was all by chance. I never thought of becoming a casting director. After two or three jobs, I never went back to acting. 

Do you remember what that moment was like when the light bulb went on and you knew this was your calling?

Yes, yes. I was working on an Italian-American project. It was a TV show called ZeroZeroZero. I was assisting, and I just said to myself, “You know what? I like this job. I want to do it.”

That was the moment, but I think that nothing happens casually. I think that being an actor was a way for me to arrive here to do this job, and I’m so glad that I acted in the past because it makes me have a different relationship with the actors when they come into the studio because I’ve been there. I’ve done that. I know exactly how they feel, and I probably have a kind of empathy for that.

Is there an appreciable difference between casting an Italian production and an American production?

Yes, there’s a very big difference. In America, the casting director usually makes a deal with the actors. Here in Italy, the deals are made by the production. The executive producer, and the line producer, are the ones who make the deals with the actors.

Having worked with a lot of American productions, especially in the last couple of years, productions request us to also make deals with the actors.

I enjoyed your work on the last Mission: Impossible movie, Dead Reckoning. The Rome sequence is such a huge part of the movie. I’m curious about the process of that job and the scope of it.

That was the year of COVID. We were supposed to start production in February, and then everything was stopped. Then it was the first movie that they started to work on that year. It was a big deal for all of us, and because of COVID, everything was done online. I never met an actor in-person at the time, and I never spoke with the director in person at the time, it was all on Zoom.

For us, it was a big change, because, before COVID, we used to work with self tapes. Maybe for actors who lived abroad or for actors who were not in Rome at the moment of the auditions, but mostly we were working in the office every day, doing live auditions. For us, it was always like this. After COVID, we started to work with self tapes more, of course, because it wasn’t possible to work in-person.

From what I’ve known in America, the self tape was already kind of established for a long time. That experience was wonderful in a way, but it was also weird because I never met anybody in-person.

You have, by any definition, a very successful casting career in Italy. Do you have any desire to cross over to do more American stuff?

Yes, I think I can do it from here. In 2022, when there were still COVID restrictions, I stayed in Brazil for four months and I worked from there. I did like, three or four movies from Brazil because it was all online. It was a perfect time zone to be because it was in the middle between LA and Italy. Five hours from LA, and four hours from Rome. (Laughs)

Do you find that you have an advantage over other Italian casting directors because your English is so good?

English is, of course, useful for working with the American market and also with the international market, because you have to interact with the director and producers, and they speak English. If it wasn’t for English, I wouldn’t have done this job. I only started because they were looking for someone who could speak English for the casting department there, so it’s all because of that.

What piece of advice or wisdom would you offer someone coming in to audition for you?

Learn the lines perfectly, so you won’t have to think about it. Once you’re there, just relax and enjoy what you’re doing. Have fun with it. That’s the key. Go with your heart and not with your mind. Be there in the present moment, and don’t think about anything else, just having fun.

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