The cast list for Smallfoot, a Warner Bros. animated feature that reverses the Bigfoot myth—it’s yetis who don’t believe in humans this time—reads like both a Q Score dream and a scheduling nightmare. Zendaya, Channing Tatum, LeBron James, Danny DeVito, Gina Rodriguez, and James Corden all signed on for the ambitious project, which had grossed $212 million worldwide as of press time.
That must be a relief for casting director Ruth Lambert, a Disney alum who cut her teeth on Pocahontas, Mulan, and Monsters, Inc.—and spent five years pulling together Smallfoot’s roster. “We pitched our little hearts out,” she says.
It’s been more than 25 years since Robin Williams’s game-changing performance in Aladdin, which ushered in a new era for animated film—one in which name-brand actors dominate a field once populated by faceless career voice-over artists. These days, it’s rare for a major animated movie not to boast a cast of stars, lured by the promise of easy, rewarding, lucrative work that doesn’t require much of a time commitment. But as more studios aggressively amp up their animation divisions in an attempt to compete with behemoths like DreamWorks and Pixar—and new technology continues to transform the animation process—there seem to be more animated films in the works than ever before. Which means that the people behind new projects have to put in more legwork to reel in the big names.
Those efforts can pay off. The feature-animation division at Warner Bros. launched only in 2013 but made an instant splash with The Lego Movie—thanks to both the movie’s classic I.P. and its stacked voice cast, featuring such stars as Chris Pratt and Elizabeth Banks. But when it comes to projects based on original material, like Smallfoot, studios have to work harder to sign stars—especially young talents like Zendaya who have the sort of huge, built-in social-media following that can make or break a film’s box office.
None of the cast of Smallfoot auditioned for their roles. Instead, the film’s team scheduled meetings with each of the stars it hoped to sign—and used elaborate means to win them over. The team took the time to animate a clip of Zendaya’s prospective Smallfoot character, a yeti named Meechee, and pair it with audio from one of her talk-show appearances. They presented it to the actress in the hopes their effort would charm her—just as Pixar had once tried to woo Al Pacino and Alec Baldwin for A Bug’s Life by lifting their voices from Glengarry Glen Ross and laying the tracks over footage of that film’s villainous grasshopper role. Neither of those actors was swayed—but Zendaya was game for Smallfoot.
Assembling this cast speaks to the tricky jigsaw puzzle that is signing a litany of big, busy stars onto a single project. Mary Hidalgo, the casting director behind the upcoming Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse(produced by Columbia Pictures and Sony Pictures Animation in association with Marvel)—which stars Shameik Moore, Mahershala Ali, Liev Schreiber, and Hailee Steinfeld—faced a similar problem when it came to finding actors for the film.
“It’s impossible,” she says of working around everyone’s schedules. “I don’t know how we do it.”
In this case, they had the benefit of superhero recognition; everyone knows Peter Parker. That gave Hidalgo and her team the freedom to audition up-and-comers for the lead role of Miles Morales, which eventually went to Moore. The actor, riding high after the Sundance hit Dope, competed against approximately 350 performers for the part, including Atlanta star Lakeith Stanfield. The film is also stuffed with cameo parts, which allowed Hidalgo to go after dream gets like Nicolas Cage—a superhero aficionado who signed on to play Spider-Man Noir, a dark and gritty alt-universe version of the web-slinger. (Producer Amy Pascal, who is friends with the actor, was able to pull him in.)
On many animated films, directors come in with a set vision, ready to dip into a reserve of stars they’ve worked with before. Wes Anderson operates that way in his live-action work, and used the same strategy when casting Fox Searchlight’s Isle of Dogs, his stop-motion feature about exiled dogs living in a dystopian Japan. Anderson wrangled a slew of old pals and past collaborators, including Bill Murray, Ed Norton, Tilda Swinton, and Jeff Goldblum, to voice various roles. He also personally reached out to Yoko Ono, who’d never been in one of his films before, for a small part. Much of the rest of the English-speaking cast was left up to casting director Douglas Aibel, who’s worked on most of Anderson’s recent films. (Casting for the Japanese-speaking starring roles in Isle of Dogs was done by Kunichi Nomura.) The American cast was rounded out by Greta Gerwig, Courtney B. Vance, and Bryan Cranston. Aibel said actors often take little convincing to work with Anderson, whose oeuvre is well established: “He has such a specific and such a beautiful vision.”
But it was difficult to cast the role of Atari, the little boy at the heart of the film—a part for a native Japanese speaker who was fluent enough in English that Anderson could direct him as he recorded most of his work in New York. Aibel can’t begin to guess how many tapes he and Anderson saw during the audition process: “I’d have to count it out,” he says. “It was many, many hundreds of kids.” They searched far and wide, even setting up sessions at sleepaway camp while auditioning children during the summer. They eventually cast Koyu Rankin, a Vancouver-based actor with only one short film to his name who was eight years old at the time of his first audition.
Casting directors prize these no-holds-barred searches, which allow them to find the best actor for the job regardless of experience or notoriety—no matter how much those choices might vex the publicity team tasked with marketing the resulting film. In that regard, it helps to be Pixar, still the standard-bearer in animation—which lends each of its films an instant cachet.
When filling out this year’s Incredibles 2, casting directors Natalie Lyon and Kevin Reher compiled a list of dream stars, as most casting heads do. But, like Anderson, Incredibles writer-director Brad Bird also wrote certain parts with specific performers in mind; Bob Odenkirk, for example, was always envisioned as charismatic businessman Winston Deavor. Other roles had less rigid instructions, like the dignitary known only as “the Ambassador.” Bird wanted someone with a unique European accent; the part eventually went to Isabella Rossellini, who split her childhood between Paris and Rome and is fluent in French, Italian, and English.
Like the Smallfoot team, the Incredibles 2 casting directors reached out to several actors of offer-only caliber. To figure out which voices might mesh well before nailing down performers, they assembled what Reher calls “nonsensical theater”—stitching together clips of different actors speaking in different projects, so that they could hear how they sound juxtaposed against one another. A major stumbling block? “It’s shocking how many people sound [too] similar,” Lyon says. “You would never think it until you divorce the look”—i.e., separate a famous voice from its famous face.
For the most part, Lyon and Reher have had good luck assembling their dream casts, though certain actors haven’t come through: “It’s either scheduling or they don’t care about children,” Reher says with a laugh.
“It’s not as coveted as it used to be, because there’s so much of it,” Lambert says, pointing out the proliferation of animated projects. Hidalgo echoes a similar sentiment: “It’s gotten really challenging because a lot of big actors have already done their animated movies,” she says. “Some people want to just do one.”
Of course, animation still has singular perks. Actors can slip into studios around the world, record their voice work, then get back to their live-action sets, carrying on business as usual. When LeBron James was deep in the throes of basketball season, for example, Warner Bros. still managed to snag him for Smallfoot by sending cast member Ely Henry, one of his frequent scene partners, to Cleveland.
Merchandising is another carrot that can get big stars on board. “Actors who have children, a lot of them want to be characters that get made into toys,” Reher says.
And, of course, there are also the qualities only an animated part can offer. “I remember Joaquin Phoenix was excited to be in Brother Bearbecause he wanted to play a bear in his career,” Hidalgo recalls. Sometimes it’s as easy as that.
