Francine Maisler’s Wild Casting Ride: Chalamet, Erivo, ‘Spider-Man,’ Connor Storrie — And the Chance to Make Oscar History With ‘Sinners’

A few months ago, Francine Maisler told me a story about securing Wunmi Mosaku for a key role in The Social Reckoning, Aaron Sorkin’s buzzy sequel to the Oscar-winning The Social Network. She’d recently cast Mosaku in Sinners, which had just been released to enormous success. “I worship the woman, and I said, ‘Aaron, I have the idea — she’s in Sinners, have you seen Sinners?’” Maisler recalled. Sorkin told her he was about to screen it; she instructed him to watch it that night. She texted him at 11 p.m. asking if he’d done so; he had. The next day, Maisler again told Sorkin, “We need to hire Wunmi for this role,” to which he replied, “Francine, do you think I could just meet her or something?” 

She sighed. “If you must.”

Sorkin, Maisler and Mosaku then had lunch at the San Vicente Bungalows in Los Angeles, and Sorkin offered her the part by meal’s end. When I pass along Maisler’s recounting to Sorkin, the Oscar-winning filmmaker cracks up. “I wouldn’t want to give you the impression that I was in any way reluctant to cast Wunmi — I was thrilled to get her because Francine made sure that I did,” he says. “But if I had any concerns about Wunmi, there was going to be trouble — I promise you that.”

Stories like this abound in Hollywood among the town’s most decorated directors, many of whom work with Maisler regularly: Denis Villeneuve, Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Greta Gerwig, Barry Jenkins, Michael Mann, Adam McKay, James L. Brooks, Steve McQueen and, of course, Ryan Coogler — whose Sinners is the most-Oscar-nominated movie of all time, and has put Maisler in pole position to win the inaugural Academy Award for achievement in casting. The field is stacked with greats of the industry, though, including Hamnet’s Nina Gold, Marty Supreme’s Jennifer Venditti and One Battle After Another’s Cassandra Kulukundis. (The final nominee, The Secret Agent’s Gabriel Domingues, hails from Brazil.) 

It may seem simple enough to credit Maisler’s front-running status to her remarkable resume, given the long-awaited nature of this prize for her entire field. (The Hollywood Reporter named her 2021’s Casting Director of the Year.) But Sinners’ sprawling ensemble is stuffed with Maisler signatures: a true discovery emerging out of a massive open casting call (Miles Caton), long-great character actors at last getting their due (Mosaku and Delroy Lindo, both earning their first Oscar noms for their performances). These are the areas where, as Jenkins told me years ago, “Francine works her magic.” 

When I first met Maisler in 2021, she told me right off the bat she didn’t like doing interviews. She’d done some press for Emmys recognition — she’s been nominated six times and is a two-time winner, for Succession and The Studio — but could keep it to a minimum since, until now, there was no equivalent recognition for her film work. As she’s learned these past few months, there’s nothing quite like an Oscar campaign. Especially when it’s impossible to tune out the noise indicating you might just win the whole thing. 

“Now I understand what actors go through — I understand what Demi Moore and Angela Bassett went through because of what you put into it and all the people in your ear,” she tells me from a Beverly Hills deli on an early February evening, referencing two recent odds-on favorites who came up short. “You prepare. You wear a dress. You go to this, go to that. And then you sit there — and lose!”

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Since her official start in 1990, Maisler has cast more than 200 films and series — averaging about six per year. She’s got a bunch in the works right now, including Coogler’s X-Files reboot and Mann’s Heat sequel, which will star (among many others) Leonardo DiCaprio. “There’s a very high degree of difficulty, put it that way — this is a new iteration, but the expectations are very high given the cast of the original,” Mann tells me of the casting process. “But there’s certain qualities we are looking for, and Francine and I both speak the same internal, intuitive language. I’m very grateful for that.” 

As I start asking Maisler about some of her most iconic projects, over a giant plate of french fries and two bowls of matzo ball soup, she admits to not remembering many of the details. To illustrate this, she references a beloved black-and-white Candid Camera clip that still makes the rounds on Instagram and TikTok: a young girl named Kathleen picking up the phone, taking a message for her father, hanging up, and swiftly lamenting, “Oh, I forgot it!” She acts this out for me a few times.

This initially comes up when she mentions Courtney Love’s audition for The People vs. Larry Flynt and Tobey Maguire’s for Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man as among her most memorable, while struggling to recall details of either. In the latter’s case, at least, “We did have to get Tobey into the Spider-Man suit — I think he had to fly across the room on a stage.” Maisler works on all scales, at all levels of visibility, in constant communication with major filmmakers and showrunners. She agonizes over every new challenge put out before her. Specific memories are understandably hard to come by given the consistency and intensity of her career. It’s occasionally obvious she’d rather be interviewing me.

“It’s all daunting, and I always feel like it’s the first time I’ve ever done it — like I’m starting all over again,” she says. “I try to say to myself, ‘You’ve been doing this a long time. You’ve never not had somebody turn up.’” 

Her first big job came in the development of The Larry Sanders Show, HBO’s lauded comedy which featured major mid-career roles for Jeffrey Tambor and Rip Torn, and cemented star-creator Garry Shandling’s genius. “The main thing I learned from him is every director, every creator, has their own process,” Maisler says. “Garry’s took a very long time. You don’t mind going through that process — I learned that everybody’s different, and some directors make very quick decisions — but when they see it, they know it.” 

From there, she quickly established herself in features, assembling the ensembles for such mid-90s classics as Reality Bites and The Usual Suspects, the latter of which led to her first of 13 film wins at the Artios Awards, the official accolades of her guild, the Casting Society. The crime thriller featured Benicio Del Toro’s breakout role as the incomprehensible low-level criminal Fred Fenster. “I don’t think we understood a word,” Maisler says of his audition. “He came up with that and the character was born.” Since that film, Maisler has cast Del Toro in Iñárritu’s 21 Grams and Villeneuve’s Sicario. He’s Oscar-nominated this year too, for One Battle After Another, and so whenever they run into each other on the awards trail, “it’s a special hug,” Maisler says.

More A-list auteurs started collaborating with Maisler, and few have looked back. “Her intuitive sensibility in and of itself is very artistic, and that’s why so many people love to work with her,” says Mann, who first worked with her on 2004’s Collateral. Adds Villeneuve, “She loves to think outside the box. She’s always looking to explore new avenues, find new voices. She’s brilliant.”

And while Maisler’s recollections can get hazy, a handful of castings remain vivid. She felt proud of Greg Kinnear nabbing a big part in As Good as It Gets opposite Helen Hunt and Jack Nicholson, going on to receive an Oscar nomination. “Everyone from Tommy Tune to Sean Penn was up for it,” Maisler says. She also cast Cynthia Erivo in her first-ever screen role, in Steve McQueen’s Widows. “I had been told to go see her in Color Purple on Broadway, and she blew me away,” Maisler says. “I told Steve, ‘You just have to see this performance.’ So he went and he met her and he just offered it to her. He didn’t even have to read her.”

Or take Maisler’s first Emmy-nominated job, assembling the all-star ensemble of Sorkin’s Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. Sorkin tells me that Maisler put the likes of Michael Stuhlbarg, Merritt Wever, and Sarah Paulson on his radar. With Stuhlbarg, “I was begging Aaron to use Michael because I had seen him in The Pillowman on Broadway, and he was up for this guest part,” Maisler says. “Then I begged him to make him a series regular. Aaron was like, ‘I can’t just make people a regular because you love them,’ so I didn’t win that. But he knew how good he was.” As for Paulson, Maisler once told me she considered the actress to be her “good luck charm” before she broke out, casting Paulson in everything from Down With Love to Mud to 12 Years a Slave. 

She remembers Timothée Chalamet breaking her heart in a reading for Beautiful Boy, the first movie to follow his breakout Oscar nod for Call Me by Your Name, before bringing him back for The King, Little Women, Bones and All, Don’t Look Up and the Dune franchise. (She’s cast him in nine films over the last decade altogether.) She remembers Emma Mackey earning the titular role of James L. Brooks’ Ella McKay, before going on to other major parts in Greta Gerwig’s Narnia and J.J. Abrams’s The Great Beyond. “When Jim Brooks says, ‘I’m casting her in my movie,’ people pay attention,” Maisler says of Mackey’s surge. “He’s got an amazing track record.”

And yes, she remembers casting Connor Storrie, long before Heated Rivalry shot him into the stratosphere, as the man who kills Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker at the end of the sequel, Folie à Deux. “He had a really interesting face and the audition was simple and real,” she says. “It was a critical part — he’s the one that ends up killing [Arthur], so it had to have been somebody really good and interesting. He was in the background, but he was there — you notice him until the end.” 

In other words, maybe Maisler remembers more than she gives herself credit for. Except when Storrie suddenly became one of the most famous actors on the internet, she admits to needing a second to connect the dots. “I didn’t know that this kid would break out in this way,” she says. “I was talking about the show, I looked at it briefly, and I go, ‘Is that the kid that we cast? No!’ And I asked someone in my office and she goes, ‘Oh yeah, that’s Connor Storrie.’”

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Maisler has cast several best-picture winners, including 12 Years a Slave and Birdman. Iñárritu, the latter’s director, cites “her great eye and suggestions on some secondary roles, which sometimes are the most difficult ones to find and could define the quality of a film,” as most crucial on that movie. “From the great Bill Camp reciting Shakespeare as an unhoused man to Lindsay Duncan as [a] theater critic…those roles were Francine’s sensibility and experience.”

It’s not hard to see that in evidence on Sinners. Maisler and Coogler were talking over the phone from the very beginning about putting Sinners together, before there was even a finished script. He cites her as one of his most important pre-production creative partners; the feeling is mutual. “I came to meet him for Creed and said, ‘Whatever this kid’s gonna do, I want to do it,’” Maisler told me some months ago. Their aligned vision is evident in the casting from the top down. Lindo, for instance, starred in one of Coogler’s most formative films, Malcolm X — but he’s also the kind of unsung legend Maisler is drawn to. Here was the chance to give him a showcase in a big-ticket movie. 

Miles Caton, the breakout young star of Sinners (and Actor Awards nominee), sent in a self-tape showing off his impressive musical ability; he was among thousands of performers that Maisler, Coogler and the producers saw, but he instantly clicked for the casting director: “When I first met Miles, I saw Ryan in him — it gives me chills. They’re both so truthful, so honest and soulful.” Caton then proved himself as an actor, earning wide acclaim for his first-ever screen role — not the first success story of its type for Maisler: On Barry Jenkins’s The Underground Railroad series, she undertook a global search for the protagonist, Cora, before finding South African star Thuso Mbedu. For Captain Phillips, she cast Barkhad Abdi in his first acting job, and he received an Oscar nomination. She read cruel dialogue opposite Lupita Nyong’o while in casting sessions for 12 Years a Slave to ensure she could contain the brutality of the part; it wound up being Nyong’o‘s first movie and won her the Oscar.

With final voting on this year’s first casting Oscar soon to get underway, there’s still some education to be done as to the scope and vitality of the job. 

“There are probably some people outside of the movie business who might feel like the casting director is sort of an administrative job, that it’s organizational, when in fact the director is counting on their talent and on their knowledge — they’re specialists,” Sorkin says. 

When you’ve got the kind of clout that Maisler has earned, that can go a long way. Take The Trial of the Chicago 7, on which Maisler and Sorkin both felt determined to cast Jeremy Strong in a pivotal role. The studio didn’t feel he was enough of a name at the time. Maisler told them, “Wait until you see Succession” — yes, she cast that too — “because he’s enough. This guy’s going to be big.”

“We got our way,” Sorkin says. Before ending our call, he then makes sure to add for me: “I wouldn’t want to make a movie without Francine.”