How the odds-on favorite to win Best Picture, 'Spotlight,' landed the most impressive cast of the year
Open Road Films
The movie, based on true events, follows investigative reporters on the Spotlight team of the Boston Globe who uncovered a massive scandal of child molestation within the local Catholic Archdiocese.
To bring this newspaper procedural to the screen with an "All the President's Men"-like intensity, director Tom McCarthy ("The Station Agent") needed actors who could fit into an ensemble, but also command the screen for individual scenes.
Barden and Schnee (whose credits include "Pitch Perfect," "Prisoners," "August: Osage County," and McCarthy's other movies) began the process as they usually do: They read an early draft of the script and then compiled a long list of actors they figured would be good fits, to go over with McCarthy.
"When you work with a director multiple times, there's a shorthand, and what comes out of that is the same tastes in actors and acting styles," Barden said.
Open Road
As other name actors came on board, like Michael Keaton as Spotlight editor Walter Robinson, Liev Schreiber as the paper's editor-in-chief Marty Baron, and Rachel McAdams as another reporter, Barden and Schnee were hard at work auditioning actors for the supporting roles.
Though the film was shot around Toronto as a double of Boston and features Canadian actors, the filmmakers ended up looking to talent with Boston roots to give it a stronger sense of place.
"There was no mandate to get people who looked like the real reporters," Schnee said. "But there were some actors we tried for roles who just weren't as authentic as Tom wanted."
And given how bad Boston accents can be in movies, they likely made the right move. In the case of one character, Patrick McSorley, a victim who speaks to Spotlight, Barden and Schnee tried trained New York actors, but McCarthy thought there was something still missing.
"Our casting person in Boston, Carolyn Pickman, found this actor Jimmy LeBlanc, and he was the real thing," Schnee said. "He gave the perfect Boston accent."
YouTube/Open Road Films
"That's the key to any casting job," Barden said. "The authenticity and the truth of the story has to come through the actors, and when you get it right it's seamless, and when it's not quite right it sticks out like a sore thumb."
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