Casting director secrets revealed

<i>Shortland Street</i> casting director Andrea Kelland (right), with Rena Owen. Photo / Matt Klitscher

Shortland Street has brought some familiar faces to Ferndale, with Rena Owen joining the cast last year and Shavaughn Ruakere starting next week.

But given how many of our screen stars have done time on the show - either as unknowns or established performers - how do you get a role on the show?

Casting director Andrea Kelland is the woman scouring Auckland for potential Shortie talent, and she advises anyone who aspires to be on the show to get themselves an agent.

When writers decide to add a new member to the cast of about 20 actors, they pass Kelland a character description that specifies age, race, and other aesthetic specifics, and she sends this out to Auckland's 22 acting agencies.

Calls for "handsome man, mid-20s" or "good-looking woman" usually see her inundated with potential candidates but the likes of Ruakere's character - which specified Maori/Polynesian - produce fewer responses.

Because Kelland goes to a lot of theatre, she says she has usually seen the actor working or has auditioned them in the past.

"So I have a kind of picture of what they are like," she says.

She selects 15 to 20 actors she is interested in seeing, and they receive their scripts at least two nights before their audition.

"We try to give them two nights' sleep with the script, to not only learn the words but get an idea of the character."

Auditions are 20 minutes long and Kelland might ask for the actor to tweak their performance to suit the character description. Auditions are taped and given to the producer who makes the final decision in consultation with the writers.

Occasionally, very well-established actors are offered roles directly, but often the producer also wants to see them with the script before they hire them.

"And most actors don't mind auditioning," Kelland says.

While there are many established actors on the show, Shortland Street is often seen as a training ground, and indeed that's the case for the four new children on the cast.

"That age group has never been to drama school so they get trained up in the fast world of television with us. But even those fresh out of drama school need to learn the reality of working how we work, which is having 15 minutes to get the scene down. Obviously it's new to everyone who comes here, unless they have done fast turnaround television before.

"I hear people say it is a training ground, but I also hear it is something you do before you become a real actor. All the people on the show are real actors. They are at the top of their game, especially those who have been on for two or three years."

Extras are a different kettle of fish, she says - they have different agents and rarely crossover into acting.

"I think being an extra is not really working your way up the acting tree, going to drama school is a much better way to be discovered."

-TimeOut