Julie Hughes and Barry Moss, who together make up Hughes/Moss Casting Ltd., have been partnered for twenty years. Their awe-inspiring credits include television, film, and over seventy Broadway shows making them one of New York’s top casting teams. Their stage work has included Nine, Torch Song Trilogy, 42nd Street, Crazy for You, Dancing at Lughnasa, The Who’s Tommy, The Will Rogers Follies, Jelly’s Last Jam, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, The Life, An Inspector Calls, Titanic, Jekyll and Hyde, The Scarlet Pimpernel and Footloose. The Hughes/Moss film work includes Big Daddy, Little Nicky, The Champ, Purple Rain, A Soldier’s Story, Cry Freedom and The Cotton Club. For television, they have cast As the World Turns, The Cosby Mysteries, A Different World, and eight seasons of The Cosby Show.
HUGHES: Not me. But I did know that I wanted to be in the theatre. Both of my parents were in the theatre. My father was a stage manager and my mother was a sometime actress. She didn’t like to audition, so she didn’t work very much. I just kind of fell into casting. I became a professional twenty or twenty-five years ago when you could almost earn a living.
MOSS: When I was in college I wanted to be an actor but I realized that I wanted to be the kind of actor who gets discovered sipping a soda at Schwabs. I didn’t want to work hard. I saw a friend of mine taking voice lessons, fencing and dance. He was working his butt off and I realized that if that’s what I had to do, I’d better find something else. I think a lot of people don’t realize how hard it is to be an actor. They think it’s easy and that all you need is a pretty face.
HUGHES: I started casting with a firm called Theatre Now. Barry was an agent at that time. He was one of the few agents who actually accompanied his actors to auditions. That used to happen twenty-five years ago. We met at that point and we had a mutual respect for one another. When I needed a partner, I asked Barry.
MOSS: The first thing we cast together was The Champ.
MOSS: Ricky was extraordinarily bright. He also had a wonderful mother. She was a very, very intelligent, caring, supportive, non-stage mother. That helps. I think the biggest mistake stage parents make is to try to act for their kids. They take the material home and tell the kids how to read it. They try to make them into Shirley Temple-y type children. But that wasn’t Rick. Actually, Franco [director Franco Zeffirelli] was looking for a kid the total opposite of Ricky. Brown haired, dark eyed. When Franco would meet with these kids, he’d throw them lines from the script and expect them to answer. So, we warned Ricky that that was going to happen and he was prepared. When he went in, Franco said to him, “You’re such a chubby little boy. Why are you so fat?” Ricky looked at him and said, “Well, you’re not exactly skinny.” He had the part at that moment!
HUGHES: I suspect it was.
MOSS: We really fought for her. Obviously, it paid off because she got the role and married one of the Coen brothers. But casting directors often fight for actors and the actor has no idea we’re doing it. They have no clue.
MOSS: You’re asking the wrong person because I don’t like Los Angeles. It’s too movie oriented for me. I went out to dinner there once and somebody said, “Isn’t it terrible about Paul Newman, his last three films have been flops.” Other than Paul, who cares? I think a better question to ask yourself is, what kind of career do want? If you want to be in film and television, you should be in Los Angeles. If you want to be in the theatre, you should be in New York. I think the best training is in New York, but that doesn’t mean you should train here and then go to Los Angeles.
HUGHES: An interesting thing that’s been happening in the last five or six years is that more people who went out to the West Coast are coming back here. I think that a lot of people feel isolated and insulated out there and are really happy to be back on the East Coast and outside in life instead of in cars.
HUGHES: Not a lot, because there’s not a lot of television here. For actors of a certain age, if they’re not slightly known, they’re not likely to get the theatre jobs. There are a lot of actors here in New York and there isn’t a lot of theatre work. It’s very competitive. I would suggest that the middle-aged actor go west because the chances are better that they’ll get episodic and movie roles and at least make some bucks.
MOSS: But even in television, the sad trend is that Carol Burnett plays the mother of Helen Hunt. Not that Carol Burnett isn’t an excellent actress, but a strong character actress should be getting those roles. They give them to stars and it’s a big problem. And there are stars who are working for scale in films. So, it’s very difficult. And casting directors are human. We have egos. If we can say, “Wow, I got Rod Steiger to do a four line bit in this movie! Aren’t I terrific!” the producers are going to go with Rod Steiger as opposed to a good, lesser known actor who needs the job.
MOSS: (laughing) Too many questions. Okay. First of all, we are very open. Our doors are never locked. We encourage actors to drop by. We encourage our receptionist to be aware of current projects we’re involved with, so they can alert us if someone who might be right for something has dropped by. We do not, however, do generals. We don’t have time. We do see every picture and résumé that comes in. Do we keep them? No. We keep the ones that are possible for the project at hand. But we do hold on to the pictures of people who we’ve seen already. If someone comes in and auditions for Titanic and we like them, we’ll go through that file when we’re casting Jekyll And Hyde. So it all pays off in the future.
HUGHES: Recently, we’ve been doing a lot of musicals, but certainly we’ve cast a lot of straight plays in the past. There are more musicals in New York and we’ve been very fortunate in that we’ve had success with them.
HUGHES: If they can, it’s a plus. One of the things we found when we were casting the Broadway company of Titanic was interesting: The director, Richard Jones, was very concerned with acting credits. He really wanted actors who could sing. We found more actors who sang than we ever dreamed existed. They came out of the woodwork. If you have a voice you can brush up for a musical, that doesn’t hurt. Although, you can either sing or you can’t and if you can’t, brushing up isn’t going to help you.
MOSS: But if we’re talking about young actors who are starting, it’s very wise for them to learn the techniques because you can always get an audition for a musical. They have chorus calls and you can always get seen.
MOSS: I’ve said this before—and this is the absolute truth but you won’t believe me—the fact is, we need you more than you need us. When you walk into an audition, you have to understand that you’re there to help us with our problem. We’re the ones in trouble. We’re the ones that have to solve this problem of putting on a show, casting a movie or getting a television show on the air and you’re there to help us do that. Actors need to remember this and have that confidence when they walk in. If you have trouble with that confidence, there’s a book I recommend every time I teach: Og Mandino’s The Greatest Salesman in the World. Basically, it gives you ten tenets of self-confidence that use a mantra every day for a month; then they become habit. I recommend the book to everybody.
HUGHES: The other empowering tip I share with actors is that they’ve got to know they have at least one friend in the room and that’s the casting director. I don’t know that this is always true, but certainly in our case it is.
MOSS: It has to be true. We don’t have time to bring you in otherwise. Every person brought in by the casting director, or the producer or director, should know they have that little cheering section.
MOSS: First of all, actors can be their own harshest critics.
HUGHES: A lot of times, they think they’ve made a mess of it and they really haven’t.
MOSS: Also, there are so many reasons for not getting a role that have absolutely nothing to do with the audition. You might look like the girl who jilted the producer on his prom night or you might be caught in a battle between the writer and the director and out you go. There are so many reasons that you can’t even begin to think about it. But, if an actor doesn’t do what we know they can do in an audition, when they’re finished, we can explain to the producers and fight for a callback.
MOSS: Just believe in yourself. Have a lot of joy in what you’re doing. People say that they hate to audition. How can they hate to audition? Auditions should be a little performance which will lead to even more performing, which you should love to do. So, remember that sometimes we see thirty or forty people in a day and it’s the people who walk in glad to be here, bright and energetic that make us think, “Oh, good!”
Barry Moss passed away in 2014.
Julie Hughes
212-868-1260 ext 22