For the first time, Academy Award-winning filmmaker Martin Scorsese cast his two most frequent lead actors, Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio, in the same film, last years Killers of the Flower Moon, a film based on a real-life series of murders of Osage members and relations in the Osage Nation shortly after oil was discovered on the land. The three-and-a-half-hour epic also includes dozens of speaking roles, which meant that work was cut out for the casting directors. In an interview with Below the Line, one of the film’s casting directors, Ellen Lewis, spoke about casting the many roles in the period piece.
Lewis explains that casting is influenced by archival documents, but the aim is not to cast lookalikes. She says, “You just start getting a sense of what the community looked like and felt like. There were photos of everybody who, I mean, this is all based on real people, many, obviously, of the family members, their photos are all in the book. But a lot of those outlaws are real. Tom White is real. But what you do is that you take that and then you have to clear your mind of that, because what we don’t do is we don’t cast lookalikes. But you want to get the essence of somebody. You want to get the soul and feeling of people.”
In particular, Lewis singles out actor Scott Shepherd, who plays DiCaprio’s character’s younger brother Byron Burkhart, for praise. “I think Scott is a remarkable, understated actor. He’s the kind of actor that I felt confident that I thought Marty would respond to. I think, in his own quiet and dangerous way, because I do think Scott has a danger about him, he adds a lot to that role. I don’t know if you’re familiar, Scott is an amazing theater actor. He’s part of the Wooster Group and the Elevator Repair company in New York. Very interesting, avant-garde theater companies in New York. He’s a great, great actor.”
Two of the film’s most talked-about casting choices are smaller roles of John Lithgow as Peter Leaward and Brendan Fraser as W. S. Hamilton, who both play attorneys. Lewis reveals that their casting came late in the process, explaining, “I knew if I cast people too early, they wouldn’t end up being available. I really waited till about five weeks before and we weren’t trying to do star cameos in any way […] I do what my process is with [Scorsese], which is I talk to him, I bring him about eight ideas and then we discuss it. They’re both great actors, and I think they add a really interesting energy to that part of the film.”
While a film like Killers of the Flower Moon has dozens of speaking parts, Lewis confesses that she doesn’t try to have a number in her head while she goes from the lead roles on down to her favorite roles to cast, the small one-day ones. She says, “I don’t know how many speaking roles there are in this film. I try actually not to do a count. It’s just like, okay, let’s just keep rolling here. We start at the top and let’s keep going. You’re just building the world hopefully through the faces for the director and it’s just a fascinating journey, really. […] I much prefer casting the small day players actually than the leads because, I don’t know, it’s just always interesting. The people that you’re meeting and you just need to believe the words they’re saying, so you get to try all sorts of people from all different walks of life.”
