Jury Duty casting director Susie Ferris takes us through her casting process that all started as a blank canvas. From the first audition tapes submitted by Susan Berger, Edy Modica, Mekki Leeper and Ron Song to reaching out to James Marsden to join the show to play "a heightened version of himself," Susie breaks down the intricacies of meeting David Bernard's vision through her stellar casting.
Director: Funmi Sunmonu
Director of Photography: AJ Young
Editor: Tajah Smith
Producer: Juliet Lopez
Line Producer: Romeeka Powell
Associate Producer: Emebeit Beyene
Production Manager: Andressa Pelachi
Production Coordinator: Kariesha Kidd
Associate Talent Manager: Paige Garbarini
Camera Operator: Oliver Lukacs
Sound : Gray Thomas-Sowers
Production Assistant: Ariel Labasan
Post Production Supervisor: Edward Taylor
Post Production Coordinator: Jovan James
Supervising Editor: Kameron Key
Assistant Editor: Lauren Worona
Director: Funmi Sunmonu
Director of Photography: AJ Young
Editor: Tajah Smith
Producer: Juliet Lopez
Line Producer: Romeeka Powell
Associate Producer: Emebeit Beyene
Production Manager: Andressa Pelachi
Production Coordinator: Kariesha Kidd
Associate Talent Manager: Paige Garbarini
Camera Operator: Oliver Lukacs
Sound : Gray Thomas-Sowers
Production Assistant: Ariel Labasan
Post Production Supervisor: Edward Taylor
Post Production Coordinator: Jovan James
Supervising Editor: Kameron Key
Assistant Editor: Lauren Worona
Category
🛠️
LifestyleTranscript
00:00 all kind of started talking about James Marsden.
00:03 And the more you talk about him,
00:04 there's no reason not to hire him.
00:06 You just cross your fingers and hope that he says yes.
00:08 - No! - No!
00:09 - Judge!
00:10 - Something's wrong.
00:11 I'm as sober as a judge.
00:13 - No!
00:13 - No!
00:14 - I'm gonna make a movie out of the movie
00:16 that's being made here.
00:17 This is [beep] insane.
00:19 - Hey, Vanity Fair.
00:20 I'm Suzy Farris, the casting director for "Jury Duty."
00:23 And today we're gonna break down how we cast the show.
00:26 [upbeat music]
00:29 [upbeat music]
00:32 Normally when you're casting a scripted show,
00:37 you'll start with a breakdown of all the characters
00:39 that you're looking for.
00:40 In this particular instance,
00:42 we didn't have any character breakdowns.
00:44 It was really a blank canvas for me
00:46 to stretch my casting muscle and figure out
00:48 the best people who could populate a jury.
00:50 Dave Brunette and I had an existing relationship.
00:53 He called me to say, "I have a comedy for you.
00:55 "It's an ensemble comedy.
00:57 "We don't need any names.
00:59 "You can have a really good time with this.
01:01 "It's kind of 'The Office' meets 'The Joe Schmo Show.'"
01:05 My reaction was, "It sounds really great.
01:08 "Thank you for calling again.
01:10 "And why don't you send me the script and I'll read it,
01:13 "and then we'll go from there."
01:14 At that point, he said,
01:15 "Why don't we all just jump on a call?"
01:17 And that's basically when I learned
01:19 that there was no script.
01:20 [upbeat music]
01:22 - I will arrest every last one of y'all.
01:24 - Is Sativa in it?
01:26 - Yes. - Sit, drink.
01:27 [claps]
01:28 - Our first step diving into the whole process
01:31 was two basic breakdowns that we had.
01:34 One was just for a male juror,
01:36 and the other one was for a female juror.
01:38 And the only requirements really were that you were 18 plus,
01:42 so you could legitimately serve on a jury.
01:45 We did say improv skills would be great.
01:48 That was really all.
01:49 We asked people to tape themselves,
01:51 and we gave them two prompts,
01:53 and they could choose one of the characters to be,
01:55 and to send us a tape no longer than 60 seconds
01:58 of them talking in that character.
02:01 - Yeah.
02:02 I came out here in the '70s with my band.
02:06 We were gonna make it big,
02:08 and then something happened in the '80s.
02:12 Odessa was overdoing the drugs, and we broke up.
02:15 - There's always a right actor for the right part,
02:17 and we got so lucky that, you know, that this was her part.
02:20 What she was doing in her self-tape,
02:22 we thought maybe we were gonna have
02:24 like an old rock and roller type female.
02:27 They ended up having the character
02:28 go in a different direction.
02:29 That was just an example of,
02:31 we love the character of Susan Berger,
02:33 so we're gonna find something to make it work for her.
02:36 - Shows my gross sales for the calendar year of 2021.
02:39 - And what do you notice from July to December 2021?
02:45 - Edie did not have a character description
02:49 that we had asked her to play.
02:51 She was just responding to one of the prompts
02:54 that we had suggested that actors give us,
02:56 and what I love so much about Edie
02:58 is that she made a really bold choice
03:00 and committed to it to the nth degree,
03:03 and it really worked.
03:05 - The next day, Craig comes home,
03:07 and he got a free Willie tattoo.
03:10 - I decided to wear my fake breasts plate,
03:14 their G cup, their $100.
03:16 When casting directors are often saying to actors,
03:18 "Make a choice," it may not always be right for the role,
03:22 but when it's right, it's right, and she's undeniable.
03:26 She's 1,000% committed to having just a strong sense of self.
03:31 Basically, I was just trying to come up
03:35 with super interesting, kind of quirky,
03:38 normal-seeming people who you would see
03:42 on a jury in Los Angeles,
03:44 every shape and color and size and age,
03:47 and make it feel as real as possible
03:50 so that we didn't give up the whole thing
03:52 before it even started.
03:53 We got 1,000 and some for the jury pool,
03:57 and then when we started to get a little more specific
04:00 about the judge and the prosecutors,
04:03 we got another 500 there
04:05 'cause we were asking for those people
04:07 to actually have legal backgrounds
04:09 so that they were okay with the legal jargon
04:11 that they were going to have to come up with themselves.
04:14 - Good afternoon, Mr. Greggs.
04:16 It's true, isn't it, sir, that you were once arrested
04:19 for masturbating in a public movie theater?
04:21 That's correct, isn't it?
04:23 - That's, yes, that's true.
04:24 [upbeat music]
04:29 - He said that Trevor was a really nice guy,
04:32 but then it came out later
04:33 that he masturbated his penal off at The Grove.
04:37 - For "Callback," it happened during COVID,
04:40 so everything was a self-tape in the beginning
04:42 for the first step,
04:43 which actually worked really well for our purposes.
04:45 And then we had a really wild callback,
04:48 which was set at a focus group company.
04:51 So the focus group pulled in half the people,
04:53 and then we had the other six people per group
04:55 would be actors,
04:56 and they were the actors that we wanted to call back.
04:59 They watched a trailer for "West Side Story,"
05:01 and it was really just meant to be a conversation.
05:04 One of our producers was the moderator
05:06 and would just ask them questions and get them talking.
05:09 To try to figure out the chemistry of the cast,
05:12 that was the big intention
05:13 behind having a focus group callback.
05:16 One of our producers, Nick Hatton,
05:17 had worked with Sacha Baron Cohen a lot,
05:19 and he was very used to sort of trying to figure out
05:23 scenarios like this in his previous work.
05:25 They were given prompts the night before by the director
05:28 about what sort of type of character he wanted them
05:31 to play within the framework of during the focus group,
05:34 and it was fascinating.
05:36 It was wild.
05:37 That's where some of the actors actually really cemented
05:39 their place on the jury in our minds.
05:41 Sadly, some of the people who we had really high hopes for
05:44 didn't really rise to the occasion.
05:45 Susan Berger, who plays Barb,
05:47 was one of the standouts of the day.
05:49 She was hilarious.
05:51 She started talking about being a freegan,
05:53 which none of us knew anything about,
05:55 but apparently a freegan does not like to spend money
05:57 on anything, specifically food.
05:59 A freegan will go around sort of as we knew it,
06:02 like dumpster diving.
06:03 She committed to this.
06:05 It was such a strong choice.
06:07 It was incredible.
06:08 We were sure that she was definitely
06:10 making it onto the jury.
06:11 [upbeat music]
06:13 - Fashion-wise, does it look okay?
06:15 - My margaritas, my margaritas!
06:17 - I got an arm wrestle, James.
06:18 - Come on, let's just go!
06:20 - The whole casting process was about 12 weeks.
06:23 We started late October, and I think by December,
06:27 we had an idea of who our jurors were.
06:30 That's when the writers started figuring out
06:32 who their characters were actually going to be.
06:34 - Who has she been there with?
06:37 - She's there with her friends, Brenna,
06:39 Francisca, and Cody, I don't know.
06:41 But they're all just like a nice little girl group.
06:46 - Is Cody a girl?
06:47 - Yeah.
06:49 - Are you sure about that?
06:52 She might be there with her friends.
06:54 - What?
06:57 - Mekki Leeper is one of my favorite jurors on the cast.
07:02 He was actually also a writer on the show.
07:05 Once they saw his initial self-tape,
07:08 they were thinking that he was like a post-college kid
07:11 and that he had come from a religious background,
07:15 a really conservative upbringing.
07:17 - My girlfriend and I have our six-month anniversary trip.
07:19 We're going to Miami because my friend Derek said
07:21 that God can't see what happens there
07:22 'cause of the humidity.
07:24 - Cassandra Blair read for a couple roles.
07:27 - They are rude as hell.
07:28 I told number 12, I said, "Sir, I cannot let you leave
07:32 "this room until six o'clock in the morning.
07:34 "It is now 4.45, you got an hour and 15 minutes."
07:37 He was like, "You don't have no authority.
07:38 "You look like a busser from the Cheesecake Factory."
07:40 - Initially, we were thinking maybe she would be
07:42 a good bailiff.
07:43 She also read for a juror,
07:46 and she came to the focus group as well,
07:49 and she was really great, just sort of deadpan
07:52 and calls a spade a spade.
07:53 - RBI?
07:54 - Yes, ma'am.
07:55 - What's RBI?
07:56 - Reddit Bureau of Investigations.
07:58 I mean, yeah, I'm into true crime documentaries,
08:01 podcasts, all that stuff, you know?
08:03 So when I got the summons, I was like, "Hell yeah, finally!"
08:06 But nah, this case is dumb.
08:08 - I love Ron's song.
08:11 My mom and I used to watch it on television
08:16 on Thursday nights in court TV.
08:21 - Ron's song "In Life" does not speak that slowly.
08:24 His tape just really cracked us up.
08:26 He also was one of the actors who cemented his role
08:29 on the jury from his focus group callback.
08:31 When asked the question,
08:32 who would he take to the premiere of the movie,
08:36 he kept repeating that very slowly,
08:39 that he would take his mother,
08:41 and then kept pressing that only, only if he had to.
08:45 He would never wanna see this movie.
08:47 And he was just hilarious.
08:48 We all walked away and we felt like,
08:50 "Okay, he's definitely a juror.
08:51 "Tick that box, who's next?"
08:53 When we got Alan Barinholtz's self-tape,
08:55 I was so over the moon.
08:57 This is exactly what every single casting director
09:00 wants all the time.
09:01 All we want is for somebody to come in and nail it.
09:04 - I've got two rules.
09:05 Make that three rules now in my court.
09:07 The first is, follow my orders.
09:10 The second is, don't bullshit me.
09:12 And the third, no dick pics.
09:15 - He showed us that he can speak legalese.
09:17 He can come up with very funny things off the cuff,
09:20 but they seem really natural to him coming out of his mouth.
09:23 And I love his Chicago accent.
09:26 It's just, it feels like that's like a character
09:29 in and of itself.
09:29 I love his age and his life experience.
09:32 It was just, it was magical.
09:34 It was perfect.
09:35 I was so excited to send it to the producers.
09:37 And the second I did, I said, this is our guy.
09:40 And everybody agreed with me.
09:41 He was living in Chicago at the time,
09:43 and he wanted to come here and play with us
09:46 for this whole length of time.
09:48 And he's actually since moved here
09:50 and he's pursuing acting,
09:51 which is a whole second career for him
09:54 that he wanted to do years ago, I'm told.
09:56 And he's fantastic.
09:57 There were a lot of actors who we saw
09:59 for the jury pool in the beginning.
10:02 And then some of whom we ended up loving
10:06 in terms of who they were and what they brought to it,
10:08 but they didn't necessarily end up on the jury.
10:11 Specifically Whitney Rice,
10:12 she came to the callback to the focus group
10:15 and she was hilarious.
10:17 She committed to being a very fancy lady
10:19 who didn't really have time for this.
10:21 And she was headed to the airport
10:22 and everybody there got really flustered
10:24 trying to figure out the quickest routes
10:26 for her to get to the airport.
10:27 Everybody was so in it with her
10:29 that she was gonna maybe miss her plane.
10:31 She didn't end up on the jury,
10:33 but she ended up being the plaintiff in our show.
10:35 And we were really looking for them
10:37 to bring interesting things to the table,
10:39 to sort of be quick on their feet
10:41 and be funny in a very grounded way.
10:44 And I think it would have been really different
10:46 had we had actors coming in the room for us at first.
10:49 There wasn't anything for me to read or interact with them.
10:52 So we got to have a good sense of what kind of thing
10:54 are they gonna bring to the table?
10:56 Because with improv,
10:58 they didn't have any dialogue in the show.
11:00 They had beats that they were supposed to hit,
11:02 but they were gonna have to come up with
11:04 all of this dialogue on their feet.
11:06 I don't know if you remember what I was wearing yesterday.
11:08 I had attachments for a chair.
11:10 I saw what you was wearing yesterday.
11:11 But I was just, if you wanted to use them.
11:12 No.
11:14 You know what though?
11:14 I do want to say, I feel like you a low-key genius.
11:19 'Cause the stuff you be saying.
11:20 Confidential.
11:23 That means top secret.
11:28 For my eyes only.
11:32 Casting James Marsden, we approached it in the same way
11:35 that we would approach normal scripted casting roles
11:39 on anything else that I've done.
11:40 We started with a really big laundry list of celebrity names.
11:44 Started to whittle it down, just thinking,
11:46 you know, who the public might like,
11:50 who we thought might be game to do something like this.
11:53 And also someone that, you know,
11:54 we thought would be really fun to work with
11:56 and be fun to watch, Dave Burnett,
11:59 and Jake Zemanski, our director.
12:02 And I had worked with James Marsden before
12:04 on something called Tour de Pharmacy.
12:06 We all kind of started talking about James Marsden.
12:09 And the more you talk about him,
12:11 there's no reason not to hire him.
12:12 You just cross your fingers and hope that he says yes.
12:15 Have you ever served on a jury before?
12:17 Yes, ma'am.
12:18 Was that here in Los Angeles?
12:20 No.
12:21 Where was it?
12:22 Cannes.
12:23 In France?
12:26 Yeah, it's the film festival.
12:27 I mean a civil or a criminal jury.
12:30 Oh, no, no, sorry.
12:32 Okay.
12:33 We got really lucky.
12:34 Dave Burnett is friendly with him
12:36 and reached out to him first
12:38 before we made an official offer to his team.
12:40 And Dave sort of explained the nature of the show,
12:43 how we were looking for, you know,
12:45 this guy to be the hero and for this celebrity
12:49 to play a very heightened version of himself.
12:52 And James thought that it would be fun.
12:54 And, you know, we got lucky.
12:59 Yesterday, the judge chose a four person.
13:02 He appointed me as it.
13:03 No surprise there.
13:04 Ronald wasn't cast yet at the point of the focus group.
13:08 That casting was happening
13:09 with the producers simultaneously.
13:11 We had to be somewhat secretive about what it was
13:15 because we didn't want to give up what the whole show was.
13:19 We really wanted to make sure that any of the candidates
13:22 in the Ronald pool wouldn't hear about this thing.
13:26 We were pretty secretive
13:27 and they were sort of sending in tapes blind.
13:29 When they got a call back for the focus group,
13:31 that's when I really laid out as much as possible
13:34 to the agent's representative saying,
13:36 "Okay, so this is the type of show it is.
13:38 "It's gonna be mostly improv
13:40 "and there's gonna be one real guy
13:41 "who's gonna be the hero.
13:43 "He's not gonna be the butt of any joke,
13:44 "but he's going to be the hero."
13:46 And tried to let them in on as much as possible.
13:49 - There's always something crazy that comes up.
13:50 - Damn it!
13:52 God damn it!
13:53 [gunshot]
13:54 - Mr. Morris.
13:55 - I was blown away by how the show turned out
13:57 and I was just amazed that these actors
14:00 were able to pull it off.
14:01 I mean, it's such a huge feat staying in character 24/7
14:05 to really have to just be on for such a long period of time.
14:10 Your guard has to be up and that can't be easy.
14:13 - I feel like I don't really want it.
14:14 - Oh my God!
14:15 - Of all of the human organs that have suboptimal design,
14:19 the heart is the most flawed of all.
14:22 I love that we were able to find people undiscovered to most
14:26 and give them this really big opportunity.
14:28 I love that they're having their moment.
14:31 Thank you, Vanity Fair, so much for having me
14:33 and I hope that you enjoyed seeing behind the curtain
14:37 of the casting process on "Jury Duty."
14:39 [upbeat music]
14:42 (upbeat music)