Interview:Jason La Padura

On June 29, 2007, RyanGibsonStewart held an interview via phone with Heroes casting director, Jason La Padura.

Ryan Stewart: I want to thank you for taking time out of your schedule for an interview. I know you're very busy casting for Heroes and other shows. Just out of curiosity, what other shows are you casting right now, or is it just Heroes?

Jason La Padura: Well, we're also going to be doing the new CBS series Cane. It stars Jimmy Smits. It's about a Cuban-American family in South Florida who are in the sugar, rum, and nightclub business.

I'm sure that those shows are taking up a lot of your time.

Yeah. [laughs]

Well, I know you're a member of the CSA, the Casting Society of America. I'm just curious what kind of training or education you need to be a casting director.

Well, you know, there's no set sort of course of study for something like casting . I got into casting because I had been working in the business since I was a teenager. I had originally gotten in as an actor. I started as an actor and stage manager, and then I was looking for something to do. I lived in New York when I was a kid. I had been going to the theater since I was, you know, like 12 years old.

I know you did some Broadway.

Yes, I'd been going to Broadway since from a very young age, and I'd seen a lot of actors on stage. I worked at the public theater back in the '70's as a stage manager. So I had seen a lot of actors backstage as well as on the different stages that were there, and I was looking for a place to put all this knowledge. I ran into a friend of mine who used to work at the casting department at the New York Shakespeare Festival, and she had an opening in her office and that's when I went to work for her. That's how I got into that.

There are specific requirements to become a member of CSA, but those are more like, you have to have two years online experience, you know, certain criteria you have to meet to become a CSA member.

Right, so there's no formal training, just criteria you have to meet.

There isn't formal training, no, there isn't. It's one of those things that almost anybody can say they can be a casting director, and sometimes I do think that people do kind of wake up in the morning and go, "Oh, I can do that!" We have a joke where we say that everybody has two jobs in life: their own and casting. Because everybody, even my mother, will say, "You know who'd be great for that part?..." [laughs]

Actually, that was one of the questions one of the members on our site had--What if somebody knows of somebody who's going to be perfect for the next Heroes role, then how do we get ahold of you for that?

Yeah, exactly. Like I said, everybody thinks they can do it.

Now you own your business with your sister, right? What's that like, working with your sister, Natalie Hart?

It's fantastic. We're very close, obviously. When we were kids, we moved around a lot. Our parents were artists. So we moved from place to place, and so we had a hard time setting up friendships with other people because every 6-9 months, we'd move again. So we kept leaving our friends behind. So we became very, very close. We also have two brothers.

Are they in the business also?

No, they're not. But Natalie and I are particularly close. When I was back in New York, I was in business with a man named Stanley Soble. Our assistant went home for the Christmas holidays and she never came back. I was sort of left in the lurch, and I asked Natalie if she wanted to come to work for us and she said she would. That was, I don't know how many years ago, 20 years ago? [laughs] And we're still working together.

That's really neat. I'm sure it's forged a nice relationship between the two of you.

Well it's great because it's a small family business. I mean, Keri Owens, who's the associate on Heroes, Keri's been with us now for like 8 years! Melissa, who is our associate on Cane, has been with us for four years. We pride ourselves in trying to elevate our assistants to associate positions on projects that we're doing. We like to think of ourselves, as I said, as a small family business.

That's fantastic. Now, I did have a couple of questions about casting for Heroes.

Sure.

You cast for major characters and for minor characters. Is that correct?

Yes, that's correct. As long as somebody actually has something to say, we cast that role.

Okay. What's that process like for either a minor character or a major character.

Well, it's different. For minor characters, generally what we do is we put out a breakdown. Keri will read the script and she will write a breakdown for the entire script. Major characters, and the guest stars, and all the co-stars. And then what we do is, after she's written it, Natalie and I take a look at it, we approve it, we send it out--we post it to breakdown services. And then we get submissions electronically, and we go over them on the breakdown site. And we look at pictures and resumes, and we decide who we want to bring in.

When it's co-stars, we're maybe looking for a specific kind of look, or it could be something like that. So that's something you can do relatively easily online. When it comes to the guest stars, we need to really be able to see what the people have done, what they're about, we pay a lot of attention to people's training, their previous credits. We're always on the lookout for new people and new talent.

Right, of course. Now, you've had some pretty big guest stars on Heroes--Malcolm McDowell, Stan Lee was on, George Takei. How do you approach "bigger name" stars like that?

Well, again, what will happen is, like in a case like Malcolm, we wanted somebody who--we wanted a certain amount of a payoff. Because we had been speaking about Linderman for awhile, we wanted somebody that people were familiar with in some sense, but not so familiar that it would be like an Ed Asner, where they go, "Oh there's Lou Grant!" You know, you want somebody that people will go, like, "I know that guy." And Malcolm's one of those men who's been around for such a long time. You know, you go back to his early stuff, like A Clockwork Orange, that made a big impact back in the '70's. That movie is still being watched today, probably by a lot of our core audience, too. They may know him from that, or they may have seen him somewhere before. But at least there's a little bit of familiarity there, and we wanted a little bit of that there. What we had done is we came up with a long list of actors, and we circulated that amongst our producers, and entered into a discussion as to who did they like, who didn't they like. Then it became, like, who's available, and who will do it for the amount of money that we have.

Well I think you made a great choice with Malcolm McDowell. For the short time that he was on, he had the gravitas--

Yeah.

--the creepiness factor--

Right.

--he really was a fantastic choice for that role.

Thank you.

And I also enjoy George Takei. I know he's returning for Season Two.

Yes.

Not only does he have the Star Trek background, and Masi Oka is a big fan of Star Trek--

Right.

That's a really great choice also.

Well, you know the thing there, of course, is we needed an actor who could speak Japanese. And that is a much more limited pool of actors here in the United States. I mean, there's a small pool, and we have been really seeing them. Keri has been prereading men and women because of storylines we're thinking about and that we're currently in production with. She's looking at people who speak Japanese quite a bit.

But we came up where we had to do Masi's dad, there's only a couple of actors that came immediately to mind. Even with the help of breakdown services and solicitations from agents, that list didn't get very large. And then George just seemed like a natural fit.

And with the success of Heroes, I'm sure that some of your actors are contacting you.

Oh yes! It's become a very different thing now. I've worked on a lot of different series over the years, and I can tell you when a series is somewhere in the middle or the bottom of the ratings list, it's a lot harder getting people on. When you're doing a big hit, people are coming to you saying, "Oh, my client would love to be on your show!" "Oh, my client would love to be on your show!" Okay, great! Especially if it's a well-known actor, what we do is we let our producers know that so-and-so is interested in being on the show so that they can keep that in mind when they're actually writing roles. Or they may actually conceive a role for somebody specifically.

They would actually include that person in the script. Interesting. Now, when somebody actually contacts you, I'm curious how many of your actors do you actually audition?

Well, it depends. We may, in prereads for a role, read dozens. But generally, we only bring a few actors to our producers. If it's a moderate sized guest role, we probably bring...six. Maybe eight. But if it's a major guest role, we may show them twenty. It'll all depend. That doesn't mean that only twenty people were seen or considered. We may have actually seen many more. When you're introducing a new series regular, you really have to see who's out there. You really do have to see a lot of people. So we spend a lot of time prereading people, but we only show a few people to the producers.

Right, you whittle it down, then.

Yeah.

Who actually has final say, then? Is that you, the producers, the directors?

Final say? Final say is -- [chuckles] -- you know, it would be nice if there was real, honest to God final say, but there isn't. [laughs] It's more of a joint decision. It is ultimately Tim Kring's decision. But Tim can get resistance from the studio or the network on something. And then he has to explain why he wants this person. If somebody at the studio or network is so dead set against something, we may not be able to get somebody we want. Even Tim may not be able to get that. Sometimes the studio or network will have to cave. Sometimes Tim will have to make a compromise on something.