Authenticity on Set: When Directors Cast Beyond Hollywood
The rise of non-professional actors in film and television is sparking debate about performance, training, and the very definition of acting.
- Directors like Josh Safdie and Paul Thomas Anderson are increasingly casting individuals without formal acting experience.
- This practice, rooted in cinematic traditions from Italian neorealism to early Soviet films, aims for heightened realism.
- While offering unique authenticity, the use of non-actors raises questions about professional training and career sustainability.
- The casting process often relies on finding individuals whose lived experiences align with the character’s needs.
Timothée Chalamet recently recalled a tense moment on the set of Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme, a film inspired by the life of table tennis player Marty Reisman. “I’m really getting in the guy’s face and I’m really trying to get him angry with me,” Chalamet said, describing his efforts to elicit a genuine reaction from a background actor. “I was saying to Josh, ‘He’s not getting angry with me, he’s not getting angry with me.’”
The unnamed extra, however, was fully engaged. Chalamet continued, “I did another take, and then the guy said, ‘I was just in jail for 30 years. You really don’t want to fuck with me. You don’t want to see me angry.’ I said to Josh, ‘Holy shit, who do you have me opposite, man?’”
The answer was a non-actor—one of many featured in Marty Supreme. Similarly, Paul Thomas Anderson incorporated individuals with no prior acting experience into his comedy action thriller, One Battle After Another. These directors are part of a long tradition of filmmakers utilizing non-professionals to achieve a specific level of authenticity, prioritizing lived experience and physical presence over traditional theatrical technique. This approach has historical roots, spanning from early Soviet cinema and Italian neorealism to even a cameo appearance by Donald Trump in Home Alone 2.
What is the appeal of casting non-actors? The goal is often to tap into a rawness and authenticity that can be difficult to replicate with trained actors, bringing a unique texture to a role.
One Battle After Another boasts a cast of established stars—Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Benicio Del Toro, and Teyana Taylor, among others—but also features James Raterman, a retired Secret Service and Department of Homeland Security Investigations special agent. Anderson discovered Raterman after he participated in The Trade, a documentary series examining the opioid crisis and human trafficking.
Despite his lack of formal acting training, Raterman fully embraced his role as Colonel Danvers. “It’s a job and you have to work at it,” Raterman explained from Columbus, Ohio. “The good thing with myself and Paul is he’s so collaborative. He allowed me with the other actors to pull it off the cuff.”
Raterman recalled a key piece of advice from Anderson: “He said, Jim, when you read the script, don’t pay attention to the words on the page; pay attention to what is it that I need you to do at that particular time. Honestly, I could have probably gone to film school and studied for years and years and maybe got that same piece of advice but, coming from somebody like Paul Thomas Anderson, it put you in a different frame of mind.”
Raterman praised the welcoming atmosphere created by the professional actors on One Battle After Another. “These are amazing A-list actors that have no problem whatsoever taking you under their wing and treating you like a family member and wanting you to elevate in such a way that the whole project gets elevated.” He added, “You never felt like a stranger, you never feel like an outsider and that started at the top. It started with Paul Thomas Anderson and that’s the way he is so everybody takes his lead. I don’t know if everybody has the same experience but they treated me like a family member from day one until even today. It was an incredible, fun, enjoyable experience. We laughed, we bonded, made some incredible friendships.”
One Battle After Another also features Paul Grimstad, a musician, writer, and professor of humanities at Yale University. Grimstad had previously avoided on-camera work after a role in his roommate’s indie film, Frownland. However, his name was suggested to casting director Cassandra Kulukundis by Ronald Bronstein, who saw a natural fit with the character Howard Sommerville.
Grimstad, 52, told a newspaper that “acting was incredibly fun” and noted that his experience as a university lecturer provided valuable preparation. “There is an element of verbal performance in teaching. I’m not talking about over-the-top showmanship, but a certain way of animating a book.”
Grimstad also appears in Marty Supreme, set in New York during the early 1950s, alongside other non-actors including supermarket magnate John Catsimatidis, former basketball players George Gervin and Tracy McGrady, essayist Pico Iyer, playwright David Mamet, fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi, television personality Kevin O’Leary, and high wire artist Philippe Petit.
Catsimatidis, 77, explained that Safdie approached him after observing his 2013 mayoral campaign. “He was looking for characters. Being a New York character, I guess I qualify. The lines that I used are things that I do in real life, so I wasn’t acting: that was me.” He added, “I enjoyed it. They worked me to midnight. They did one scene 20 times over. Josh Safdie was a great director. He’s a perfectionist and I appreciate somebody that wants perfection.”
Petit, who famously walked between the twin towers of the World Trade Center in 1974, noted the “freshness” that non-actors can bring to a role. “Very often when you take a non-actor instead of a movie star for a movie, that non-actor doesn’t have the training and some of it could be negative but I also very much like to have a complete newcomer to do something important. It’s sometimes a revelation.”
McGrady, 46, who played for the Orlando Magic and Houston Rockets, added via email: “I think we bring something real. There’s an authenticity that comes from people who’ve lived a different life and bring that energy naturally. For me, I’m just being myself and bringing my own experience to the role. Sometimes that rawness adds something special (hopefully).”
Gervin, 73, dubbed the “Iceman” during his time with the San Antonio Spurs, said he met Safdie at a card show years ago. “We shook hands and spoke and the next thing I know, I’m getting a call from the studio that Josh would like me to play a role in the movie.” Safdie, Gervin noted, “is very careful in who he picks. He said, when I met George Gervin, George was so warm that he made me feel that he can run an orphanage. He knows that I have two charter schools so I’m around kids all the time and educate them. Did he take a chance? Probably so but he was in control of what goes in and what goes out and I’m glad he had that kind of confidence in me.”
Gervin acknowledged the demanding hours involved in filmmaking. “I went on set at three in the afternoon and didn’t finish till about four in the morning. I wasn’t used to that kind of endurance but it only took me a day to do the little part that I had in the movie. You have a different respect for someone like Timothée, who’s the main character and he was up 12 hours with me. You have to be mentally and physically strong to accomplish what he did. I am truly impressed with what goes into making movies.”
Safdie’s vision for Lawrence’s club as a haven for outsiders informed the casting process, allowing casting director Jennifer Venditti to build a story through faces and 1950s photographs. Her work on Marty Supreme has been shortlisted for the new Oscar category of best casting.
Venditti, who began street casting 25 years ago, has collaborated with Josh and Benny Safdie for years, including casting Kevin Garnett as himself in their 2019 film, Uncut Gems.
She explained, “One of our signature things is this idea that we are looking to recreate the cinema of life. Sometimes we love actors and characters but sometimes in the pool of actors we can’t find the texture that’s needed to build the authenticity of the world that we’re exploring.”
Venditti added, “We’re always trying to create this alchemy of these incredible actors who know where scenes are going and then these wild people who can add the texture and mystery of they don’t know where the scene’s going and it’s the tension between those two things that creates the excitement in Josh’s films. It’s how we see the world and how we want to see it on screen.”
How do established actors respond? “At first, if you’re like a very trained actor, it can be alarming in a sense of like, wait, this person’s not following the rules or talking over me. But Josh is such an amazing director that creates such a safe environment, they trust him and they then realise that kind of wildness is lending to their performance.”
The process is reciprocal, Venditti noted. “The scene partner makes these real people good. Timothée is in every scene showing up with his dedication and his focus and his level of mastery. They are so good because they’re in a scene with someone that’s demanding that of them then they rise to meet each other.”
The use of non-actors has a rich history, dating back to early Soviet films like Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin and October in the 1920s. Italian neorealist films, such as Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves, frequently employed non-actors to portray the working class, often using post-production dubbing for dialogue and emotional control.
Notable examples in the U.S. and UK include The Best Years of Our Lives, featuring Harold Russell, a World War II veteran; The Killing Fields, with Haing S Ngor, a Cambodian doctor and genocide survivor; and United 93, in which real flight crew and personnel played themselves.
Catherine O’Rawe, author of The Non-Professional Actor: Italian Neorealist Cinema and Beyond and a professor at the University of Bristol, says: “The non-professional is such an interesting figure. It forces us to look at the question of what is acting, what is performance? Is it just standing up and saying a line? What is it that good acting brings? Some of the non-actors, for example, in the films of postwar Italy were not necessarily what we would think of as brilliant actors but had an amazing face that the director loved.”
However, the practice has also sparked controversy. Four-year-old Victoire Thivisol won best actress at the 1996 Venice Film Festival for her role in Ponette. O’Rawe says: “The performance was so affecting that she won this award and the director collected it on her behalf and got booed by the critics and audience because it’s seen as an affront to profession: if a four-year-old can do this then what is the craft of acting worth?”
In 2018, Yalitza Aparicio made her acting debut in Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, earning an Oscar nomination. O’Rawe comments: “She was a total non-actor and that was a source of great fascination among the press but sometimes people are a bit uncomfortable that someone with no training can actually be nominated for awards because then for professional actors it can mean, well, why have we spent our lives training and doing all this performance study if somebody can just walk off the streets and win an Oscar?”
These “accidental stars” often struggle to sustain a career, lacking the infrastructure and support needed to transition a single moment of authenticity into a lasting profession. O’Rawe reflects: “These debates have gone on and they come back at different times but there is always this undercurrent of both the resentment and also that the industry might love these people once but they’re not going to support them.”
“There are so many cases of these actors who after one big moment, sometimes even winning an award, will find that they can’t get jobs because they’re not trained, don’t have any contacts in the film industry or don’t have any agents or managers or people looking after them. It can be very difficult to build or sustain a career.”
