Jennifer Cooper Talks Getting into Casting and the Oddest Hot ‘CSI: NY’ Request

Similar to many casting directors, Jennifer Cooper found her way into the field following a brief stint pursuing acting.

She has cast more than 500 episodes of television in her career, which is an astonishing number when you break it down. Some of the biggest franchises on the small screen feature her work, with titles like CSI: NY and the reboots of Hawaii Five-0, MacGyver, Magnum P.I. and Quantum Leap. Adding to her intriguing profile, she also curates small indie films between orchestrating major TV projects, sharing her insights with us from Los Angeles.

Insights From Jennifer Cooper

Actors should focus on being authentic to themselves and the story, rather than trying to guess what the casting director wants.

Building long-term relationships with casting directors is valuable because casting is a collaborative, ongoing process.

Don’t be afraid to take on diverse or smaller projects to grow your craft and keep casting directors interested in your range.

Let Casting Frontier be your partner in your acting journey. Sign up or log in and elevate your career!

How did you get into casting?

I went to Emerson and they have a program, you can spend your last semester in LA, interning in the field that you find interesting. So I interned in a casting office. From there, I got my first assistant job, then got my first associate and just climbed the ranks of casting from internship to opening my shop.

What was it about casting that interested you?

I thought I wanted to be an actor when I moved to LA and I made it for like two weeks and decided immediately that that was not for me. I look back now and I feel like in every acting class, I always liked watching and critiquing and always preferred working on my friends’ scenes as opposed to being the one up there. I didn’t know that at the time. I didn’t know casting was a thing until I moved here.

There are two things that I hear a lot from casting directors. One is a lot of them thought they wanted to be an actor first, and the other, with a couple of exceptions, say some variation of “I didn’t even know casting was a thing.”

(Laughs) It’s true. It’s so funny. I mean, even when I meet people out in the world and you say, ‘Oh, you’re a casting director.’ Everyone is like, ‘What does that mean?’ Every one of my mom’s friends is like, ‘That’s so cool. I’ve no idea what that is.’

Well, how do you explain it? It seems straightforward to me. It’s the job title.

I always try and explain it in ways like we’re the stop before you get to final decisions so that we can begin to curate in our imagination what it might look like, or sound like, or different variations of it. I think there is also some sort of misunderstanding that we get a directive from someone who says, go find this exact thing, which is so far from the truth.

We’re sort of the conduit of creativity, between what the actors are doing and what people are looking for. I can’t tell you how many times someone will say, ‘This is what I want,’ and you bring them something different, and immediately they’re like, ‘Yes, that is exactly what I was talking about.’

Now do your mom’s friends understand? When you explain it to them like this?

Yes. Then they all want to be on whatever project you’re working on. (Laughs) One of my very first jobs was CSI: NY and every single person was like, ‘Can I please be a dead body?’ One of the things that is hard to explain, it’s like the worst job in the world being a dead body. Laying around still, for like eight hours. It’s the worst.

That’s a really good segue because I wanted to ask you about your focus being primarily on television. Was that the intention?

I feel like similar to any career, probably when you start doing something and you have some amount of success in it, it begets more work. So as soon as I started doing a big procedural tentpole show and it was going very well, you get known for doing the thing that you did.

I think there was some amount of, at some point in my career, feeling like I better start angling to take jobs that look different so that I am not doing the same thing. Because it’s not even like I went out and sought out to do that, it just sort of spun out into all of a sudden you’re taking job after job after job, [which is] what you’re getting known for.

It had to be a real conscious choice to say I’m going to start passing on shows that I traditionally would be the exact person you’d think of to do it. To take something that feels really different and really off-brand or a different color so that I get to a place that feels more well-rounded.

I make sure that I allocate 25 percent of what I’m doing to tiny Indies. Movies that I think are really interesting or cool that maybe don’t have the budget to go get a big casting director that you can begin to flex in other areas. Just to keep myself interested and growing in what I’m doing.

What piece of advice or wisdom would you give to someone coming in to audition for you?

Gosh, I think that what pops into my mind is to not worry about what I’m looking for. Focus on what’s right for the story and right for you as an actor. Because I feel like when actors make decisions based on being cast, it’s so hard to get it right.

Your actual take and your actual essence are what I’m most interested in, as opposed to everybody trying to come in and fit it into the box that they think I’m looking for. With every single tape that I show or that I look at, I am praying it’s the person. Always. Or, that I’ll be able to craft it into helping to get you the job or, barring that, to build a relationship with you over however many years it takes to get you 10 jobs.

It’s a long-lasting partnership between actors and casting directors and I really look at it like a partnership, because if they don’t do good, then I don’t feel good. It’s in direct correlation to each other.

This interview has been edited for clarity.