Amazon Freevee’s Emmy-nominated comedy series “Jury Duty” is an incontestable success. At the core of the show is its cast, defined by a pool of actors and one single civilian (aka Ronald) who doesn’t know that he’s being filmed for a reality show. Casting director Susie Farris revealed at Variety‘s Artisans presented by HBO that it took her 12 weeks to assemble the standout cast.
“My casting process took about 12 weeks,” she said. “We saw over 1,000 tapes for all of the jurors.”
David Bernard initially approached Farris about casting what he called an “ensemble comedy” series. “I jumped on a phone call to learn that there was no actual script for me to read and we went from there,” she said. “I didn’t ultimately know what they were going to be playing and what it was going to look like.”
Farris said it was important to her to cast a “cross-section of people” that could represent a real jury in Los Angeles. Casting actors who could create an interesting character “and could come up with interesting dialogue [while being] quick on their feet” was of the utmost importance.
“We were looking for anybody who had a comedy or improv background who seemed like a real person,” said Farris. “We ended up having one major callback session which was in the form of a focus group.”
From there, two focus groups of 30 actors and “regular people” were established to test their talents. “In each group, the actors were not told who the other actors were, and the regular people had no idea there were actors amongst them,” she revealed. “That’s where we saw people cement their roles on our cast.”
Farris revealed one standout casting was Susan Berger. “There was a moment when the writers thought that they were going to have a character who was a rock and roll woman — that was the audition [Susan] ended up sending in,” she said. “Ultimately they didn’t end up doing that with her character, but when they saw her, everyone kind of knew that she belonged on the jury.”
Watch the full conversation above.
