Art Of An Ensemble: Casting 'Everything Everywhere All At Once'

When casting director Sarah Halley Finn first got the script for Everything Everywhere All At Once, the lead role, Evelyn, was originally written for a man. But something wasn’t clicking.

“We weren't finding the perfect fit,” Finn says. Then, writer/director duo Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, known as The Daniels, returned with a version of the lead who was just meant for Michelle Yeoh and Finn says, “The rest is history.”

The Casting Society of America’s highest honor is called the Artios Award. It’s a Greek word that means “perfectly fitted.” In every cast, especially an ensemble cast, it’s crucial for every piece to fit together.

An ensemble cast is like a puzzle. Multiple pieces — in this case, actors — are coming together to each serve a crucial role in telling a larger story. The definition of an ensemble can feel a bit vague. The term is used to cover everything from the cast of a film like Love Actually, where multiple characters are at the center of their own intertwined vignettes, to Life Aquatic, where a singular protagonist is surrounded by other principal characters who have meaty plots of their own. The combination of multiple moving parts in an ensemble can prove tricky.

Finn has over 100 feature film credits and has won the Artios six times. Finn says there’s an intangible aspect to putting an ensemble together.

“There's the chemistry between and among these actors and hopefully what we achieve is actually a kind of alchemy… there is a bit of magic that happens,” she said. On the flip side, “When it's wrong, it's jarring. I think that when an ensemble isn't really seamless, unfortunately, those cracks peek through and you feel it.”

But Finn rarely misses. You’ll probably find one of your favorite ensembles in her vast body of work. From teen classics like Blue Crush and She’s The Man to slick action flicks like The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, Finn’s done it all, including casting every Marvel project since Iron Man (2008). And most recently, her career has involved casting the most awarded film in history, Everything Everywhere All At Once.

Jamie Lee Curtis, James Hong, Ke Huy Quan, Michelle Yeoh, Jonathan Wang, Daniel Kwan, Stephanie Hsu, and Daniel Scheinert, winners of the Best Picture award for ’Everything Everywhere All at Once,’ pose in the press room during the 95th Annual Academy Awards in Hollywood.

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Rodin Eckenroth

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Finn came to EEAAO through a Marvel connection. Marvel directors the Russo Brothers connected Finn with EEAAO directors The Daniels, and the casting collaboration started. EEAAO is an inter-generational multiverse movie that plays with surreal absurdity and comic book concepts to tell the story of an immigrant mother and her daughter struggling to find a world where they can understand each other. It asks a lot of its ensemble.

“We were looking at so many of these characters from two angles,” Finn says.

In a multiverse film, actors have to play versions of themselves that toe a fine line — believably the same, but different. Ke Huy Quan’s character, Waymon, is an example Finn points to.

“It's not just Waymon, it's Alpha Waymon," Finn says. "So, the casting process involved a lot of reflection and looking at things from different angles. Are we gonna lean into the alpha part or do we have an actor who's organically more one or the other?”

A still of Ke Huy Quan in character as Alpha Waymon in the film "Everything Everywhere All At Once."

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“Mayhem and fun,” is how Finn ultimately describes the casting process of EEAAO. There’s a playfulness to the casting process, a creative collaboration. And she says that stays the same regardless of the scale of a film. “I am in the same audition room with an actor doing the same thing in every reading, whether it's for a $2 million movie or a $100 million movie.”

You can see some of that creative collaboration in Academy Award nominee Stephanie Hsu’s audition tape for the role of Joy/Jobu Topaki.

“The more people are aware of how it's done, everything that goes into finally arriving at the perfect choice,” Finn says, about the release of the tape, “I think there will be a better understanding and appreciation of what the craft of casting really is.”

You can hear more about Sarah Halley Finn’s career as a casting director and her experiences working in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and on EEAAO, on The Academy Museum Podcast. 

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How do I find The Academy Museum Podcast?

It's now available from LAist Studios. Check it out wherever you get your podcasts! Or listen to Episode 10: Art of an Ensemble: Casting 'Everything Everywhere All At Once' in the player above.