Going into casting, we all knew that the three leads would be a challenge to find ideal actors for. We knew that Mark Sandler (The Sadist) would be especially important and vital because the character is so dynamic, and that a high percentage of the story revolves around him.

Craig Frank rests in between takes in Compulsions.

When you approach casting a role like Mark, you tend to get sucked in to the darkness of the torture scenes. Thus, it was important to us that we look for actors who effectively play both sides of the character. Mark isn’t a sadist 100% of the time, you need to make sure that the actor can address the human side of the character. Bring in some sympathy, and of course very importantly, make the audience root for him. This isn’t unlike manyof our modern day leading men in episodic content. Jack Bauer (24), Dr. House (House), Vic Mackey (The Shield), and Tony Soprano (The Sopranos) are all great examples of leading men who are in reality bad people, yet we as an audience will root for them.

During casting Nathan and Michael advanced on those they felt were the great performances and trust me they had a lot to choose from. We read all ages and all races for this role. What was a great testament to Web Actors, was that 4 of the 6 finalists for Mark were Web TV Actors. In the finals from the web you had Craig Frank (obviously), Joel Bryant (After Judgment), David Beeler, and Tom Konkle (Safety Geeks: SVI). Quick tangent, I cannot tell you how great Joel, David, and Tom’s auditions were. One wasn’t better than the other, they were all equally stellar in very different ways. To give you a very basic idea, Joel Bryant’s was reminiscent of Hugh Jackman, Tom Konkle was very Brendan Gleeson, and David Beeler’s was very Jason Issacs. I remember specifically about 2 hours after David did his audition, one of the readers called me during their lunch break and said “David Beeler was amazing… he blew us all away”.

So with that, what made us go with Craig Frank?… here’s how it went.  Going into the final day of casting (at this point I personally had not seen a single audition, so I’m going off Nathan and Mike) they really didn’t have a clear front runner for the Mark role. Craig had yet to read at this point, but Mike and I knew that he was gonna bring it. Mike and I were also very unsure about if Craig even really fit in the role in the first place.

Fast forward to the end of the day. Mike comes to pick me up for our tape viewing session and the first thing he says is “Craig just made it very interesting”. When I finally got to view the auditions, I saw exactly what he meant. Craig managed to bring this layer of sympathy to the role yet still remain completely terrifying. Here was this (literally) sadistic character giving us this level that sucked us in. He made us care for this Sadist and yet for the life of us we didn’t know why. It was fun to watch, and we hope you enjoy it as much as we did come next Tuesday.

When you’re in the final steps in finishing a series Fridays aren’t the relief that most 9-5ers get. They’re just the start of yet another working weekend! Anyway, lets get to today’s topic.

Annemarie Pazmino looks over her lines.

In the early stages of the project I remember having a conversation with Tubefilter’s Marc Hustvedt about the show. He asked me if we were going to cast a bunch of web TV actors for our ensemble. At the time I told him that I didn’t think so, it’s not because we didn’t want to cast Web TV actors, it’s just that we were ‘casting’ a pretty wide net and were going to pick the best person available, web star or not.  So naturally with the sheer number of people that we were having come in to read that weren’t part of the web TV community, I figured the Web Actors would get dwarfed out simply by statistics. It turned out I couldn’t have been more wrong.

We found out pretty quickly in the process that a lot of the web actors were “bringing it” during the auditions. Am I playing favorites? No, cause I wasn’t even there to witness this first hand. Remember it was Director Nathan Atkinson and Producer Michael Tohl who were seeing everyone, they didn’t care what web series each actor had in their resume cause at the time, they hadn’t seen anything. Well at the end of each day, I’d notice more and more of the “highlighted” auditions being web actors.  I was both surprised and ecstatic because it really validated the web space to me and my fellow crew members as having legitimate talent.

We saw actors from shows across the web, Sorority Forever, Lonelygirl15, Safety Geeks: SVI, The Crew, Gold, and After Judgment to name a few, and with that we saw eye opening auditions being represented from each of those shows. So what happened at the end? Well one quarter of our ensemble are web veterans (including Taryn O’Neill) as well as two of the three leads (Craig Frank  and Annemarie Pazmino ).

In a later post, I’ll get into the specific stories of casting each of the roles, but until then you shouldn’t let the negative stigma of web series affect your judgment of the actors because Web Series actors can Act!

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