Tell me about this name…

I thought you’d never ask! This will come as no surprise to people who know me - this section is a bit long. But it speaks to the intentionality and analysis I bring to my practice, so I invite you to read on, if you’d like to know more about me and how Casting by Them came to be. And big shoutout to Andrew Hodge for designing my beautiful, super gay logo!

SOME BACKGROUND…

I came up in casting working for and being surrounded by people who had named their business after themselves. Look up the casting office for any musical, play, TV show, or movie. It won’t be hard to find plenty of examples.

It was easy for me to accept that was just what was done. So it made sense to me to do the same thing when I got the opportunity to open my own office - I was proud of the work that had gone into my career up to that point and was excited to get to put my name on something. So Andrew Fem(enella) Casting entered the world. Why not?

It’s important for me to note that despite being Andrew Fem in my personal life for… ever(?), I went with Andrew Femenella Casting because I had two bosses that told me I wasn’t allowed to use Andrew Fem for work and as my email address while I worked for them because it wasn’t professional. Take a beat with that. So it took a little while to unlearn that homophobia that I had been conditioned to internalize and to really believe that my queerness is not, in fact, unprofessional; it actually makes me better equipped to do what I’m interested in doing in my work - more on that on the Core Values page.

I also didn’t recognize this practice for what it is - individualism, one of the main characteristics of white supremacy culture. Shoutout to colleague and overall light Victor Vázquez at X Casting for sending me this article by Showing Up for Racial Justice: The Characteristics of White Supremacy Culture. The information in that article has become an invaluable resource and was very activating for me.

I refer back to that SURJ article and similar resources frequently because WSC is a shape-shifter and sometimes (even often) things I’ve accepted as standard or not requiring any analysis are actually practices that are upholding WSC in my work.

So a simple and effective method to dismantle this one way in which I uphold WSC in my practice was to change the name of the business.

And here we are… Casting by Them.

I like this name for two main reasons: it centers queerness and it’s a shift away from individualism.

REASON #1: It centers queerness. Period.

In my career as a queerdo who works in casting, I want to support and uplift the future generations of casting queerdos to come. And in my practice as a casting director, I aim to champion and create opportunities for historically excluded and underrepresented communities however I can - this includes doing that for my fellow queerdos who are performers.

Don’t get me wrong, in casting there’s plenty of space and opportunity for white gays - and I say that as a white queer with proximity to maleness. But I noticed that most of the gay people I knew in casting were pretty solidly aligned with heteronormative standards, and there didn’t seem to be a lot of real queerdos in casting - at least not among the casting professionals I knew and/or who seemed to hold the highest-profile jobs - quick shoutout to casting colleague Henry Russell Bergstein for having always held it down, and in a Barbra tee no less. So I’m grateful to now be part of the small but mighty and growing community of proper queerdos in casting, and I wanted to center that in the name of the company.

And in my practice as a casting director, over the course of casting High Maintenance, one of the great joys was getting to watch fellow queerdos walk into the audition room (often for the first time for a TV gig, and many times for their first audition ever) and if they hadn’t met me before, they got to be greeted by a fellow queerdo, which was nice on its own. But even moreso, they were not just greeted by any fellow queerdo in the room, they were greeted by a fellow queerdo who had a meaningful say and influence in the larger decision-making process - a fellow queerdo who had some power and agency and could use their position as a potential gatekeeper to make sure that gate stayed wide open while they worked to tear it down entirely.

Every time I would meet these performers, their eyes would light up, their shoulders would drop, and they would be able to bring their full selves to their auditions and do their best work. In centering queerness in the name of the company, my hope is that actors can have a little bit of that experience before they even meet me and can feel empowered to show up to their auditions that much more fully.

REASON #2: It’s an intentional, explicit shift away from individualism and toward recognition of group effort and mutual support.

Casting is a collaboration, not a solo effort. Individualism creates a culture of competition and isolation; it discourages cooperation and teamwork. We can also think about individualism in the story told by a company’s name: to have a company name that features only one person’s name (or two or three people’s names - you get it), props up that individual and, however unintentionally, erases the efforts of everyone else who contributed to the casting process - not just the casting associates, assistants, and interns, but everyone who contributed to the process, from all departments that were involved.

The practice of propping up one person over the group feeds the desire for individual recognition and in so doing reinforces a culture of perfectionism and either/or thinking (two more characteristics of WSC). In short, it’s not ideal. While I felt like I didn’t have any examples of people who didn’t name their offices after themselves when I was coming up, I’m grateful that this name change allows me to now be part of the community of people who are setting these positive examples for those around us and those after us - Victor’s company X Casting is a great example of one such company name. See also The Casting Collab and TBD Casting.

IN CLOSING…

That’s why we’re Casting by Them. Them as both a nice reminder of that magical genderless singular pronoun and an acknowledgment of larger community and group effort; a centering of queerness and a simultaneous shift away from individualism and one little gay puff directed at the house of cards we’re going to topple known as (cishet) white (male) supremacy culture.