Updated March 6, 2026 at 3:00 AM PST
For the first time in the history of the Academy Awards, the people responsible for casting movies will be honored at the Oscars ceremony. There are five nominees in the new achievement in casting category, all of whom worked on films that are up for best picture.
"We're finally at the moment where casting is recognized as a craft alongside all of the others," says Richard Hicks, a governor of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' casting director's branch. "It's something the casting community has been hoping for 30 years."
The groundswell of support for an award category at the Oscars had been growing for years.
"This is a celebration for all of us and those who came before us, the architects of casting," says nominee Francine Maisler.
Until the late 1960s, the job of hiring actors for films was largely ignored and seen as clerical work — especially during Hollywood's studio system years.
Lynn Stalmaster became the first casting director to receive a credit for his work on the 1968 film The Thomas Crown Affair. That was an honor not afforded to casting director Marion Dougherty, who tried to get her name in the credits of Midnight Cowboy, Grease, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, among others.
In 1991, Robert Redford, Paul Newman, Clint Eastwood and others tried unsuccessfully to get Dougherty a special Academy Award. Stalmaster received an honorary Oscar in 2016 for his lifetime achievements.
"Obviously there were other amazing casting directors who didn't get recognized, and this will have to be for a lot of them as well," says nominee Nina Gold, who helped spearhead the push for the Oscar category.
And the nominees are …
One Battle After Another
Cassandra Kulukundis has cast all of Paul Thomas Anderson's films, including One Battle After Another.
All of the film's leads have Oscar nominations: Leonardo DiCaprio plays a washed-up former revolutionary, Teyana Taylor a former leader of the French 75 resistance, Sean Penn a repressed right-wing colonel, and Benicio Del Toro a karate sensei helping immigrants.
Kulukundis had her work cut out for her to cast the rest of the huge ensemble.
"We didn't want to have too many recognizable names, because at some point that's like overkill," she tells NPR. "There's actors you haven't seen in ages that I had to find practically in the North Pole."
For the role of Avanti, a bounty hunter, Kulukundis tracked down actor Eric Schweig in Inuvik, a remote Canadian city, north of the Arctic Circle. She remembered him from the 1992 film The Last of the Mohicans.
"He was in a place that I actually had to look up on a map, with almost no Wi-Fi," she says. "I was like, 'what are you doing up there?' 'You know, making knives and everything,' he said. I'm like, 'Oh my god, you are my Avanti.'"
Kulukundis says she found many others — mostly non-actors — to play immigrants, skateboarders, tattoo artists and military soldiers.
To cast Willa, the daughter of DiCaprio's character, she scoured martial arts tournaments, karate dojos, gymnastics and dance studios. Then someone sent her a video of Chase Infiniti dancing with her K-pop group.
"As great as all those girls were, my eyes just zeroed on her and I was like, that one. That's the one I want," she recalls.
Who would she cast to play herself in a film?
"I keep getting told I look like Sean Young."
Hamnet
Casting director Nina Gold has spent 35 years scouting actors in plays and theater showcases in the U.K. and Ireland. When Chloe Zhao asked her to cast the roles of William Shakespeare and his wife for Hamnet, Gold remembered Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley.
"I've been looking at Jessie, actually, since before she was a professional actress and really, really thought she was amazing," Gold recalls. "Then we brought in Paul. I've also been looking at him since his drama school days. That's the thing about casting, it's a long, long game of building up your knowledge of people over decades, really, sometimes."
Gold also cast the children in the film, including brothers Jacobi and Noah Jupe, who play Hamnet and Hamlet.
She got her start as an extra in an AC/DC music video, and went on to cast The Crown and Game of Thrones.
"I guess I am ultimately most interested in some sort of essence and feeling more than how they look," Gold says of actors. "You can't call somebody who looks completely wrong, but people can do an awful lot with their acting if they're a really superbly incredible actor."
Who would play Gold in a movie?
"Someone once thought I was Olivia Colman,"
The Secret Agent
The Secret Agent is set in 1970s Brazil — specifically, Recife in the state of Pernambuco.
"In Brazil there are many accents because it's a huge country with 200 million people," casting director Gabriel Domingues told NPR. "We [had] a specific idea of working with people with that accent from the Northeast."
Domingues put together a mosaic of Brazilian actors and non-actors to surround Wagner Moura, who plays Marcelo, a professor hunted down during the country's dictatorship.
Among the many actors, 79-year-old Tânia Maria stole the scene. She plays the raspy-voiced, chain-smoking housemother of a safe house for political refugees. She only started acting in 2019, appearing in filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho's film Bacurau. She's become a fan favorite.
"She's a cinematic diva," Domingues says. "She was so cool because she was just being herself, so spontaneous, so comfortable in her own skin."
And in the Brazilian city of Natal, Domingues found actor Kaiony Venâncio to play the gunman hired to track down Marcelo. Domingues says he followed Mendonça Filho's cue.
"He said this character must look like a very specific serial killer from Brazil famous in the '70s called 'o pistoleiro de Serra Talhada'— the gunman from Serra Talhada," says Domingues.
Who would Domingues cast to play himself?
Emma Stone. "She's funny and after Poor Things, she can do anything."
Marty Supreme
Timothée Chalamet spent years preparing to play the fast-talking ping-pong hustler Marty Mauser in Marty Supreme, a movie he co-produced. He's now nominated for best actor at this year's Oscars.
But casting director Jennifer Venditti had to find everyone else to play in his cinematic world, including rapper Tyler, The Creator and Shark Tank star Kevin O'Leary.
Venditti specializes in "street casting" — finding talent literally in the streets, at Walmart stores, strip club bathrooms, festivals, and anywhere else — using her intuition.
"Do I feel it?" she asks rhetorically. "If I feel it, then the audience will feel it, you know? Or do I see it? Can I see something that other people can't see?"
To cast Josh Safdie's film, Venditti went to table tennis tournaments, Coney Island and farmers markets. She found Luke Manley, who plays Marty's friend, in a viral video of a drunken rant.
And actress Odessa Azion wowed her to land the role of Marty's girlfriend by sending an audition tape she made in a phone booth in Budapest.
"I started as a insatiably curious little girl who was obsessed with people-watching," says Venditti. Later in life, she worked in the fashion world before making documentaries, then casting. She says she likes to populate her film worlds with people who are unconventional.
Who would play her?
"A lot of people say Laura Dern."
Sinners
The vampire thriller Sinners stars Michael B. Jordan as twins Smoke and Stack. He's nominated for best actor at this year's Oscars and casting director Francine Maisler is a frontrunner in her category.
Maisler collaborated with director Ryan Coogler to put together the cast, including veteran actor Delroy Lindo and newcomers like Miles Catan.
"The thrill is to be in the room with someone like Wunmi Mosaku when she auditioned with Michael B. Jordan. I couldn't believe their chemistry," Maisler tells NPR. "So that's the job. To find those people and to give them opportunities."
Maisler is also a producer, but she's known for casting many acclaimed films, including 12 Years a Slave, The Revenant, and Birdman.
She says casting directors are the first people a director calls to make a movie. "My job is to help them see the different possibilities," says Maisler. "I love being a casting director and so proud of it. All I want to do is be there to support the director's vision and to give actors a chance."
Who could play Maisler in a movie?
"Frances McDormand," she suggests. "Or Viola Davis. They've both just got such fire."
We'll find out who Academy members cast their votes for on March 15.
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