Meet the Casting Director: A Conversation with Claire B., Senior Casting Director at Central Casting
Though you may never notice their individual features or know their character names, background actors are an essential part of creating a film or television show. After all, stadiums, courtrooms and city streets would just look like empty sets without background actors to give them life.
For 100 years, Central Casting, an Entertainment Partners company, has been Hollywood’s go-to resource for hiring background actors, stand-ins and doubles, offering expertise and premium casting services for productions of all shapes and sizes.
Claire B., a senior casting director out of Central Casting’s Los Angeles office, is one such casting expert. Through the course of her career, Claire has booked background talent in more than 120 productions, including feature films Get Smart and Valentine’s Day, and television series New Girl, The Goldbergs, The Middle, and NCIS: Los Angeles. With Central Casting’s cutting-edge technology and her two decades of experience, Claire is known for delivering the right background actors for any scene.
The path to Central Casting
Like many good stories, Claire’s journey to Central Casting began in an unlikely place: the Superman Celebration in Metropolis, IL.
While studying film at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Claire was a reporter for alt.news 26:46, a student-run news magazine TV show. Her most memorable – and life-changing – assignment was interviewing Superman at the annual festival. As Claire would soon discover, Superman was really an actor from Los Angeles flown out by the festival to portray the Man of Steel.
Through the course of this serendipitous meeting, Claire shared her dream of moving to Los Angeles to pursue a career in casting. The festival Superman’s wife, also an actor, planted a seed that would change the course of Claire’s future. She suggested that Claire should apply for a casting assistant position at the biggest name in the game, Central Casting.
After graduation, Claire did just that. Now 20 years later, Claire is one of Hollywood’s most sought-after casting directors, known for her expert casting eye, excellent client service and commitment to delivering the perfect background cast for her client’s productions, time after time.
As for Superman and his wife? “I believe they both still do background work,” Claire says. “Any time I see their photos come up in our database, I smile and think about how they started me on the path to Central Casting.”
The art and science of casting background actors
While watching your favorite movies and TV shows, you probably don’t give the people in the background a second thought. And that’s by design. As non-speaking roles, background actors are hired to fill out the environment of a scene. By contrast, you would really notice if they weren’t there!
It may seem easy to add some pedestrians to a city street or diners to a bustling restaurant, but each scene requires a casting director’s meticulous planning, research, scheduling, and a surprising amount of math. That’s where Claire and the talented casting directors at Central Casting come into play. But how do they do it?
The casting magic begins during pre-production. As Claire explains, the casting director begins their process by immersing themselves in the story. During this time, Claire will read the script and meet with the director to ensure she clearly understands the setting, the emotional and visual tone, and overall aesthetic the director is trying to achieve. These early conversations inform the type of background actors needed to fit the story, and lay the foundation which Claire will build upon as she hand-selects each actor for each scene.
When production starts, the pressure is on. Orders for background actors are oftentimes submitted to the Central Casting offices just a day or two before the film date, a tight timeline that requires quick thinking and precision. This is where math comes in.
A typical casting breakdown may look something like ‘30 diners, 6 waitstaff, 3 chefs, 1 hostess, 4 stand-ins and 1 hand double.’ Discerning assistant directors may even specify demographic distributions, calling for exact numbers of actors to portray an ethnicity or age range. What sets Claire apart from her peers is her thoughtful approach to each casting breakdown. Rather than filling numbers in an order, she builds a nuanced community of individuals that feel real to the story. This artistic approach is one of the many reasons she is one of the most in-demand casting experts at Central Casting.
For The Pitt, a medical drama set in Pittsburgh but filmed in Los Angeles, Claire conducted extensive research, using US Census data to understand local demographics and ensure background actors accurately represented the unique population of the Steel City. She knew audiences in the Northeast would immediately notice if background actors with LA tans and trendy hairstyles filled the halls of Noah Wyle’s hospital; they would stand out and pull focus away from the lead cast – the opposite of a background actor’s job.
Claire B. (bottom center) with background actors at The Pitt season one wrap party
“I think of background casting as an art,” Claire says. "You’re being creative and helping build the world the stories take place in. Can you imagine a romantic comedy without background actors? It would be empty and eerie.”
Throughout her career, Claire has booked countless background actors, stand-ins, and doubles. While each project is a unique experience, some stand out from the rest.
As a casting assistant working alongside Jennifer Bender (now the Executive Vice President of Central Casting) in 2006’s The Holiday, Claire visited set and had the chance to watch Nancy Myers direct a scene. “Since that movie has stood the test of time, it’s one I often watch around the Holidays. It is another fun reminder of my start at Central Casting,” she says.
For the 2014 Hilary Swank film You’re Not You about a woman diagnosed with ALS, the production team wanted to hire people living with ALS as background actors to authentically capture how the disease affects the movements and actions of the patients in a hospital scene. To fulfill production’s request, Claire put out a casting call for people in Los Angeles who were living with ALS and interested in working as background actors in the film. Through conversations during the casting process and set visits, Claire connected with many of these background actors and was moved by their stories of resilience and hope. “That was a really powerful experience,” she recalls. “And we were able to shine a light on some really incredible people.”
Unparalleled service and expertise
Do you know the difference between eyebrow styles of the early 1990s and the mid-2010s? Or the evolution of facial hair from the 1960s to 1970s? Claire does. And in background casting, details matter, even the small ones.
Through years of casting projects set in different time periods, and booking roles ranging from 1990s middle school students in Young Sheldon to inhabitants of a distant planet in John Carter, Claire has developed an expert casting eye that her clients implicitly trust.
That level of confidence and trust in Claire has fostered many long-standing relationships in the industry and cemented her reputation among casting directors as one of the best. Claire has worked on seven different television series that aired for seven seasons or more—remarkable longevity and a testament to her professionalism and exceptional service. Productions don’t just re-hire Claire; they see her as an invaluable member of the team, contributing to the continued success of the project, season after season.
“Working with the same crew year after year is really special,” Claire says. “You really get to know them as individuals, and understand how close everybody is. When you’re a part of that, you watch these shows and don’t just see the stories, you see all the people who came together to make it happen.”
A century of innovation: The evolution of background casting
Central Casting was founded 100 years ago with the mission to revolutionize the process of hiring background actors for Hollywood studios. This legacy of innovation remains core to the Central Casting brand to this day.
When Claire first started at Central Casting, the casting landscape was remarkably different. Background actors were primarily reachable through a system of phone calls or by posting flyers throughout the community. Casting directors like Claire would spend countless hours making phone calls to each background actor they needed to book, tracking talent through paper-heavy processes and physical photographs. This logistical nightmare was time-consuming and inefficient, especially for scenes that required hundreds of background actors on short notice.
Today, Central Casting remains at the forefront of the industry. Their cutting-edge technology, the Casting Portal, allows casting directors like Claire to quickly search through the largest and most diverse database of background talent in the industry with ease. In just a few clicks, Claire can filter for specific requirements – like hair color, special skills, and wardrobe – review digital portfolios, contact background actors, and hire picture-perfect looks in a fraction of the time it once took.
This technological advantage has made Claire somewhat of a casting superhero. “It’s so much easier now to collaborate with my productions, really digging into the specific looks they need,” Claire says. “It also gives me time to get to set to check-in with our clients, and to see our background actors and thank them for all their hard work.”
The technology has changed, but the mission remains the same. With end-to-end casting and payroll solutions, a century of experience, and dedicated casting directors like Claire, Central Casting continues to set the standard in background casting.
The casting director’s advice for getting your start in the industry
How do you break into the entertainment industry? This is the question Claire gets asked the most—it is also the easiest one to answer. Whether you want to be an actor, a writer, a director, or any production role, Claire’s advice is always the same: sign up with Central Casting.
In her 20 years as a casting director, Claire has seen requests for everything from contortionists to body builders to people with missing limbs. With production requests varied and unpredictable, there is ample opportunity for people of all types to get booked as a background actor.
While a great way to get on-set experience and exposure to a variety of industry roles, including cinematographers, assistant directors, and costumers, background work also offers a unique opportunity to network with industry professionals, build community with others who share your passion for filmmaking, and can even steer you to a future career path.
“Being a background actor is a great way to get set experience and see what jobs interest you,” Claire says. “And when you do a good job and are dependable, other opportunities may pop up.”
Just like Claire’s fateful meeting at a Superman Celebration, you never know where a chance encounter on set may lead. You may even be the next actor, director, writer – or casting director Straight out of Central Casting.