The first thing Nicole Hilliard-Forde wants you to know about herself is that she doesn’t like attention. She starts talking about it right at the top of your conversation, and it’s rather charming.
The interest in remaining in the shadows isn’t what makes her so good at her job, of course, but it does allow her a certain freedom. It’s also led to a successful career that has included lots of indie films like the acclaimed 2023 drama The Novice, as well as the British and Canadian series Malory Towers, the Apple TV + sci-fi series Circuit Breakers and the Amazon family drama Beyond Black Beauty. She earned an Emmy nomination in 2007 for The Path to 9/11, as well.
Joined by Yoshi, one of her two cats, the Canadian casting director spoke to us from her home in the Toronto suburb of Ancaster (The other, Zuma, was too shy to take part).
How did you first get into casting?
My parents were both immigrants and when I was a child, I was given only one option, which was to follow an academic pathway and become either a doctor, a lawyer or an engineer. I ended up going to McGill University of Montreal on a pre-med track to neurobiology and neurosurgery with a full scholarship.
I happened to love biology and be very good academically, but as an extracurricular, I was a ballet dancer, starting at age eight. By day, I was a very, very nerdy, academic science student. Then every night and on the weekends, I was expressing myself through ballet and modern dance. At one point, I just looked around and said, “This isn’t my dream. This is my parents’ dream.”
I came to find out for myself in this dark period of discovery that I was someone who was obsessed with international cinema, and I had also been keeping every single playbill from every play I’d gone to see. I was keeping the names just on my own of every actor.
Photo by Anthony D’Elia, courtesy of Nicole Hilliard-Forde.So you’re saying the nerdiness came in handy?
Yes, I was obsessed. As soon as I had this moment at university, I went to the theater department. I said that I wanted to do anything, and they asked if I wanted to be a stage manager. I said, “I don’t have any idea what that is, but I’ll do it. I’m sure I can wing it.” I found myself always sitting beside a director observing, archiving and managing these creative spaces beside theater directors and dance choreographers.
One day I saw that I thought I’d been following the work of directors as a cinephile, but I started to notice that there was a casting director credit in the films and that I was following the work of Avy Kaufman. I researched what a casting director was and I was like, “I think, I think I could do this job.”
It seems like so many casting directors come to it accidentally and find they have this strange affinity for it.
I had given myself 10,000 hours already into being a casting director without knowing it. I just nerdily and intrinsically was doing what a casting director would do to be ready.
How did that translate to work?
I got a job in the production office on the film, The Skulls, which was shot in Toronto. At the end of that film, I knocked on the casting director’s door, the Canadian casting director Claire Walker, who said she’d take my resume and we’ll see what happens. I got to work with Lisa Parasyn, who did Schitt’s Creek, and I became an assistant with her.
What did your parents say about this career change?
They weren’t happy. They only came around when I lucked into an Emmy nomination, and then they said, “Oh, okay, sounds like you might have made the right choice.” They’ve forgiven me now but it was not easy.
I think there’s a certain type of person who becomes a casting director, someone who loves actors but isn’t interested in performing themselves.
We’re a very eccentric bunch. There’s only, I’m going to say, 30 of us in Canada, give or take. It’s a small group of people. Mostly women and gay men who are obsessed with actors, obsessed with the craft, with discovery and with that little pathway where one particular role, one particular gig can change the trajectory of someone’s whole career.
Wanting to facilitate that and recognizing that within us we have the skills to leverage all of our relationships and make that happen for someone is part of the main thrust of why we do what we do. It’s incredible to be a part of someone’s journey that way. I think we’re all real helpers. We love it. It’s our soul. It’s everything.
You talk about the community. When the Academy finally announced they were going to recognize casting, I talked to a bunch of casting directors, and everybody was so thrilled and said the same thing. That it doesn’t matter who wins, because they would be thrilled for whoever wins because this community celebrates each other. That is so rare in any profession, especially entertainment.
It is. I think casting directors do have a very deep ethical point of view on the business.
The types of people that I encounter in the industry, my peers, are interested in making sure that everybody involved in their process is having a humane experience of what they’re doing. We have this particular seat at the conference table of how the show is being put together, and I think we take that seat very seriously and are the people who advocate for the process being humane.
What do think is the biggest mistake you see actors making in auditions?
Actors aren’t making mistakes, necessarily. More often than not, the bulk of actors are making strong choices, showing their commitment, their creativity and tapping in and interpreting the text and making a strong choice. What ends up happening is that it lifts off another top layer of actors who are more connected to the text and then bring more vulnerability and make a bolder choice. Somebody else came in and put more of their heart on their sleeve and they let us see more of their soul.
With that in mind, is there a piece of wisdom or advice you would give to somebody who was coming to audition for you?
Well, when I do my auditions, I like to give the actors access to me. If someone has an audition for me and they’re preparing for their audition over days and then they have this strange and eccentric question, I allow them to get in touch with my office and ask me that strange question.
To me, number one, they’re engaging with the text on a deep level that I love to hear. I love to know that someone’s putting all of their mind, body, and soul into figuring out what this work is about, what the performance style is going to be and what the embodiment of the text is going to be. It is this exploration of text that we’re collaborating on, and we’re showing the creator of the work different embodied versions and different iterations of how this text can live.
The more questions I’m getting back, the more I can hear people engaging. I encourage people to ask questions and people to think about it a lot. It’s going to require a piece of you every time.
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