“Night Sky”, “Yellow Jackets”, “Pachinko” and the challenges of many stars playing the same characters

We often see this in shows: flashbacks or flash-forwards to give the viewer a deeper look into the lives of our favorite characters or what life has to offer. But to establish a deep connection with the characters for the audience, casting directors are far from seeking physical and spiritual similarities to translate multiple actors in the same role, young or old.

NBC It’s us The past eight years have been a prime example of doing just that, and Emmy shows this season how yellow jackets, pachinko s Ღ the sky Show young and old versions of the main characters as the main component of the story.

Show time yellow jackets However, the step was taken. It has two simultaneous stories that merge: the first, which takes place in the 1990s, tells the story of a group of teenagers who get lost in a plane crash in the desert, and the second follows the same adult characters. . with what happened all these years. Advance.

Casting directors June Lowry-Johnson and Libby Goldstein simultaneously began looking for young and veteran actors, notes Goldstein. Adds Lori-Johnson: “We were basically looking for really good actors that we thought would be suitable for each role, and so we put them together. Melanie Linsky was the first person we got involved with, and that helped shape the younger version of Shauna, but the younger version [played by Sophie Nélisse] He was the last person we found.

That’s because Linsky has “very unusual and unique rhythms and creatures” in her performance, says Lori-Johnson. “He is very selfless in this matter and it will take you some time to understand how incredibly unique he is. Together with Sophie, we immediately fell in love with her, we saw that she had an ink soul. They are not aggressive towards you about it. This is a slow detection.”

That’s what Goldstein and Lori-Johnson were looking for in the selection process. The physical resemblance wasn’t a huge priority, however, as we got closer to the cast, it just so happened that the resemblance started to form.

“One thing Libby always says is, ‘You’re looking for the soul and spirit of an actor and a character, and you want them to come together, and then let’s work on the physicality,’” says Lori-Johnson. “But we weren’t looking for similarities.” Eventually, however, the physical resemblance became unusual, especially for Christina Ritchie and Samantha Hanrat, who play the older and teen versions of Misty, respectively. “It’s just amazing,” says Lori-Johnson. “It’s really funny because I don’t think the old and new versions work together. They are not together in any of the scenes, but Sam really needs to see Christina, she just lives in him and they are very similar. With Juliet Lewis and Sophie Thatcher playing two versions of Natalie, both are so unique that I think that’s what connects them to each other, rather than being similar to each other.

I remember the producers at the time and everyone saying, ‘Oh, it’s going to be really hard და’ and I remember Libby saying, ‘Okay, it won’t be any harder.’ For us it wasn’t that scary, we could have been naive. We felt we could do it.”

with Ღ the skyGoldstein and Lori-Johnson, who also filmed the Amazon series, took a different approach to yellow jackets Since the show’s two stars, Oscar winners Sisi Spacek and JK Simmons, have a cult-yet-unique look. Spacek and Simmons play a couple who have set up another planetary portal in their garden shed. In the seventh episode, the duo has youthful performances, so Goldstein and Laurie-Johnson knew they were tasked with finding two people who looked like Spacek and Simmons when they were young.

Spacek was the first person to play Irene York, and since Spacek “now looks exactly like her when she was 25 and everyone knows what she looked like,” Goldstein said, he and Laurie-Johnson tried to match Laurie-Johnson. Her character in Speiski’s youthful appearance. Then they found Lily Cardon, who physically resembled Spacek early in his career.

“But it was short-lived and also the other way around, so we could get in and out,” Goldstein said. “It just came to our attention then. It was really sweet, it really bothers you when that happens. ”

For Simmons’ character Franklin, Goldstein admits he looked at images of the actor in his youth and tried to match the younger version of Franklin with Simmons’ appearance when he was 20, which is how they focused on Lowry Brown. appeared dopsik s Hillbil’s Elegy.

Meanwhile on Apple TV+ pachinkoAudiences travel back and forth in time to film the life of protagonist Sunja, so casting directors Michelle Wade Byrd and Mary Vernier knew that the three actresses for the role would have to be in different age groups. For them, it all started with figuring out which version of the character would take up most of the show. In this case, it was a teenage version of Sunja, played by Minha Kim. Once they found Kim, they handed her a younger and an older version of this character: Yuna and Oscar winner Yuh-Jung Yun, respectively.

“The process of finding Minha was very difficult because we had to find a hero from our story, and that’s how we look around the world,” said Wade Bird. “We did the US, we did Korea, and every time we saw Minha reading, we were blown away.”

For the previous version of Sunja, Wade Byrd and Vernier knew that only a “limited group of women” would be available due to the specific age group that would work for the character. “We really wanted this person to fit in because they feel the same, Yu-jung and Minha: their souls are alike,” added Vernier. “Both really embody Sunja’s soul.”

One thing that was very important to the duo was that the physical resemblance of the three women also matched. “That’s one of the details we always try to delve into,” says Vernier.

Adds Wade Bird: “This selection process was quite difficult because 90% of the roles only spoke Korean or Japanese, and some of the roles spoke multiple languages, so this was something we had to navigate. Also, it was filmed in October 2020, at the height of the pandemic, and we started looking in June. When it comes to hiring people, we had to think about getting people visas and there was an extreme delay due to COVID. Sometimes it took six to eight weeks to get this visa. It was filmed in Canada and South Korea and both countries had a two-week quarantine.

Vernier notes, “We really researched the world and watched hundreds and hundreds of Korean and Japanese tapes and learned a lot about languages ​​and cultures. It was a really fascinating experience.”

The story first appeared in the June 15 issue of The Hollywood Reporter. Click here to subscribe.