One thing that perceptive listeners of Supernatural Sexuality with Doctor Seabrooke are likely to notice is just how many people are involved in the show - Every episode has 3 writers and at least 4 actors (sometimes more), and the majority of these change for every episode. In fact, the show’s first season has 37 call segments, written by 18 writers, which called for 39 speaking roles. Even if I got to take one role, that’s still 38 roles that need to be filled.
Now, some producers might suddenly turn white at that number, because it’s a lot. The idea of engaging in a casting call with that many roles probably seems really intimidating, not to mention trying to keep everyone’s contribution organised!
And as well as the sheer number of actors, we had another big goal in mind with our casting - we wanted, as best as we could, to cast as diversely as possible, right from the get go. This was particularly important to us, as producers, because that’s something that we haven’t always done well at with our previous productions. While we’ve always been pretty good at casting diversely when it comes to gender and sexuality, our track record with race started out on a pretty poor footing. Season 1 of Love and Luck, much to our everlasting regret, had not a single actor of colour, and while we’ve worked to improve this, in all of our productions, for Seabrooke, we wanted to work really hard to get racial diversity into our cast from the very beginning, and learn from the mistakes we’ve made previously.
So, all up, a pretty big ask - Cast 38 actors, and get as many people of color and other underrepresented groups into the show as possible. Something like this doesn’t happen without a plan, and without some thought into the casting process, and today, we’d like to share with you how we did it.
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