How hidden powers shape everything you see in TV and film

When it comes to awards season – and especially this weekend's Oscars – the usual conversations are ones centred around the somewhat predictable awards race, which movie will bag best picture, what films may be snubbed completely and often, the directors and casts that brought these staggering tales to life.

While many take to the stage to receive their accolades making poignant speeches about their film's subject matters, how long and arduous the process was and the amazing crew of people who were a part of that process, it's hard to fit in all of the vital people in any filmmaking process into the Oscars' short 45-second acceptance speech.

More often than not, whether you're an avid cinephile or just a casual movie consumer, then it's an unfortunate circumstance that many of us only ever think about a film or TV show's leads, the standout supporting stars, the director and maybe its writer. For all of that hard work done by so many people, there's nowhere near enough recognition for all the moving cogs of any production's well-oiled machine.

Well, things are slowly changing. For the first time ever, the Oscars are venturing into the world of casting and have established a brand new category for best casting at this year's 98th ceremony. The news was announced back in 2024, marking the introduction of a brand new awards category, the first since best animated feature film was introduced in 2001.

Being nominated for their casting efforts in a monumental first for the Academy Awards are Hamnet, Marty Supreme, One Battle After Another, Sinners and The Secret Agent.

But the Oscars have been slightly slow on the casting pick-up. The BAFTAs introduced their casting award in 2020, the British Independent Film Awards (BIFA) in 2017 and the Primetime Emmys actually paved the way by recognising casting all the way back in 1991.

For all of the ensembles with such natural chemistry, the leads that take to material like a duck to water and rising stars that have seemingly been plucked from nowhere, there's a somewhat hidden department that's to thank – and that's casting.

One of the UK's leading casting directors, Shaheen Baig, tells me that she thinks it's been a long time coming for casting to be recognised on such a global stage like the Oscars. "Casting is, most of the time, the first department to come on as soon as the script is greenlit. The casting director is nearly always the first hire and you're on that job from day one," she says.

"Casting directors are sometimes like a form of a producer because you're finding an actor that then triggers the finance that gets the film made. We work very closely with the director and it is a craft, it is an art. Casting is an art like all the other brilliant departments. I think it's really, really great it's being recognised at the Oscars because it should. If you don't have great actors, you don't have a project. Casting directors do amazing work and they should be recognised for it."

But Baig underlines that while it's great for individuals to get their awards, the light needs to continually be shone on casting as a craft. For a long time, Baig tells me, people have often just thought of casting in relation to reality TV shows and have lacked education around what goes into it. With the BAFTAs having recognised casting and now the Oscars, it's only a good thing for the industry going forward, she says.

"It makes it much more visible, less secret, less 'this is a thing that happens behind closed doors' – and that's healthier," she admits.

Baig refers to casting as a "slightly secret industry", but why can it be so cloak-and-dagger? It's simply due to the very nature of the process, she tells me, the people who are involved, the scripts, the NDAs, the very act of negotiating contracts and deals. It's also down to the fact that auditioning can also be a "vulnerable process" in and of itself, Baig says.

"This is all confidential information. So I think because of that, it just has always had a bit of a secrecy about it. Whereas, editing or cinematography or hair and make-up or costume, in a way, they're much more visible. You can go to school, you can go to college or a specialist university and study those things. It's not an exact thing, casting is an instinctive craft and I think because of that, it's been quite hard to pin down."

But it's an industry that Baig herself is opening the doors to and is trying to get people to learn more about. After a whirlwind year of being plummeted into the spotlight for being the person to discover Owen Cooper for his acting debut in Netflix's Adolescence, Baig won her first ever Primetime Emmy, despite having cast over 200 movies and TV shows in her career. Some of Baig's recent notable hits include Urchin, The Death of Bunny Munro, Just Act Normal and My Father's Shadow, as well as upcoming shows like Bait and The Cage.

Despite clearly always having a lot on her plate with various films and TV series to cast, Baig co-founded the casting course at the National Film and Television School (NFTS) with fellow leading casting director Jina Jay back in 2019. The pair, who have just recently been announced as co-recipients of this year's NFTS Fellowship, continue to run their course and shine a light on the often hidden world of casting.

Having discussed it with Jay many years ago, Baig says that it was crucial to create more opportunities by facilitating a course like this one. "We felt that we needed much better representation. I was really passionate about regionality as well, because the industry has been quite London-centric," she says.

It was a case of creating a course, taking it to the school's director who was supportive from day one, bringing on fellow casting director Jane Arnell and going from there. "There is no other course at the moment that can aid you into a career in casting, this is the only course and I think it's really important that – like everything else – it's not a hidden industry," Baig says.

"Casting was such a closed shop and the only way we are going to open out the industry in all ways, shapes and forms and diversify the industry is by making everybody feel welcome and opening the doors and going, 'Right, okay, this is what casting is, this is how you do it'."

For many of us sitting in a cinema or at home watching our favourite shows, we're most bowled over when performances quite literally knock us for six. That's certainly what came with Cooper's role in Adolescence, and rings true when we think of Hamnet's Jessie Buckley or Sinners star Michael B Jordan. But how does a casting director go about even thinking of someone for a role?

"The first place to start from is always the script. It can be a script, it can be a treatment, it can be a book because sometimes it hasn't made it into a script form yet. So, you have to start from the script, because that's all you have really. I read it, digest it and then think. I always visualise when I read a script, because I've got a visual mind," Baig tells me.

If it's a TV production then that can mean that a director isn't on board at the time Baig joins the production but if they are, she'll chat with them, the producers and writers about the tone of the piece. "What is it that you want to try and achieve with this story?" is another question that Baig underlines as being of importance in her process.

"When the director's on board, we just talk a lot about actors; the kind of actors that might be right, the style of acting. Then it's my job to break that down, break those characters down and then start to present ideas to the director, to the producer, to the writer or the financier about, 'Okay, these are the different ways of casting this role.'"

Baig outlines that often when putting a character (or a couple of characters) in a lead role, that will then trigger the financial side of the production. "You might have pressure to cast an actor of a certain profile. That will then trigger the finance for the film, which then means it can get made," she reveals.

Last year, Oscar-winning actor Mark Rylance revealed that he took a pay cut in order to allow Wolf Hall: The Mirror and The Light to get made. Director Peter Kosminsky said that Rylance's salary decrease decision was made because streamers declined to co-produce the second instalment with the BBC. So, of course, finances are a whole other crucial topic to deal with when thinking of putting together any production.

"It's a bit like painting a picture," Baig smiles. "You then start to add different people and you start creating a whole world. Because it doesn't matter if a character has one line or is the lead of the film, they're all as important as one another. It's my job to make sure that the ensemble is coherent, makes sense, feels truthful."

Baig explains that depending on the show or film, her role in the production can finish before filming happens or it can continue all the way through, especially if she's working on an episodic series or a production where the scripts keep changing.

Baig is often cited as the casting director who discovered stars like Tom Holland, Florence Pugh and Barry Keoghan, all household names at this point. But when it comes to any film or series, how do you go about painting that picture in the first place? It's a job that must come with building up a major database of faces, I offer. That database, Baig tells me, is actually her brain a lot of the time.

"As a casting director, you train yourself to remember and I remember faces," she tells me. Finding the right person for any role is a mixture of tapping into her memories of working with people and faces she knows, as well as doing casting calls and nationwide searches for the right fit.

As a "mixed-race girl from Birmingham" that barely knew anything about casting when she entered the industry, lowering the barrier to entry (whether that be behind-the-scenes in casting or in front of the camera as an actor through being a trustee of Open Door) is incredibly important for Baig. It's that innate desire to represent regions and various voices that filters into the way she casts her productions, sometimes by social media and also, by building those relationships in certain communities to gain trust and do some on-the-ground searches for people too.

But really, it's also about never getting stale in her approach and moving forwards with the times, absorbing when and if the style of acting changes.

"We watch a huge amount of stuff. We go to the theatre, me and my office, we watch a lot of stuff on television, we see a lot of films. That's the education. You have to constantly be educating yourself about actors. There's always someone new, there's always someone coming through. There's always someone you know from another country in an amazing film at a festival in Sāo Paulo or wherever," Baig says.

Essentially, the work never stops when it comes to casting as there's always new people to look out for and new scripts to get to grips with.

In her expansive career, Baig worked on the original Channel 4 seasons of Black Mirror, which were a fabulous stepping stone for so many British actors. "The story was the star," Baig tells me of her time casting the Charlie Brooker series in those early days, describing the team as a "bunch of punks making this wild show". Now, in its more Americanised Netflix iteration, it's still great but "it's a different show, it has a different life".

As for now, Baig also beams when speaking about Peaky Blinders. She cast the entirety of the original show, the new film and is working on the upcoming sequel series. Even though it's a world that she knows very well at this point, Baig says that working on the new Peaky Blinders series has been "scary... but really exciting".

When Baig first came onboard for Peaky, she said she approached it like casting a film and that's why she was keen to get Cillian Murphy in the starring role because at that point, he'd never done any television. "That memory came into my head when we were in the middle of doing this new series. I'm going to approach it in exactly the same way so I'm very excited. But I'm very nervous, because I hope people love it as much as they did."

With the Oscars now recognising casting and Baig's own Primetime Emmy win last year, it seems as though the tides are turning as more people start to learn about what goes into assembling the often stellar casts we see lighting up our screens.

"I think Adolescence is an unusual event. For a piece of television to have an impact in the way it has... none of us could have predicted that at all. We all felt like we were making a really good piece of drama, but I think the reaction and the impact has shocked all of us," Baig says. "I mostly feel pride and also, I'm just really happy that people are talking about casting as a craft."

The 98th Academy Awards will take place on Sunday 15 March.

Casting directors Shaheen Baig and Jina Jay are the co-recipients of this year's prestigious National Film & Television School Fellowship. The pair co-founded the Casting course at the UK's leading Film and Television school in 2019 and have been running it ever since.

For info on future Casting courses, visit https://nfts.co.uk/casting. The application deadline for this year's course is 7 May 2026.

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