“Actors here—I’m talking very generally—can be very lazy and very snobby about auditions.”

This from John Hubbard, revered casting director, as we sit in a small conference room in his fourth-floor walk-up office in Westminster, in the heart of London. The occasion for the chat is a book I’m writing about how certain popular films and television shows were cast, from the Breakdown (or, as they’re called here, the “brief”) onward. And John—along with a staff that includes his wife Ros, his son Daniel, and his daughter Amy McLane—was a key casting director on one of the most popular film trilogies of all time, The Lord of the Rings.

In addition to giving me all sorts of interesting dish about almost-ran casting ideas—Kate Winslet for Eowyn, Liz Hurley for Arwen, Mark Addy for Samwise, Daniel Craig for Boromir, Tom Baker (the most beloved Dr. Who) for Gandalf, Daniel Day Lewis for Aragorn—Hubbard is holding forth about the differences between American and English actors.

“In America, it’s so competitive. The wonderful thing about actors who’ve been to America is that they’re so disciplined when they come here. They come in, they’re on time, they’re clean-shaven, they’re off the page. Because they’ve come from an environment where you can’t go into a casting and go, ‘Oh, sorry—was I supposed to look at this?’ You’re out so fast. You’ve gotta be prepared.”

With English actors, he said, “There is a lot of sort of like, ‘Oh, sorry, left my script in the car,’ or, ‘My fax chewed it up.’ The one I love is, ‘I only got [the script] last night.’ Well, what the fuck have you been doing for the last eight hours? And we’re not talking brain surgery here. I’m amazed in this country how many people don’t come in off the page. Occasionally an actor just sits down there, and I say, ‘Oh, did you get the sides?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘Did you need to…?’ ‘No.’ And they just look me in the eye and do it. Boy, do they get a million times closer to the part, and the opportunity, than somebody who’s ill-prepared.”

This tendency to treat auditions casually is changing, he said, especially with younger English actors, whom he finds “more ambitious to be famous, more ambitious to get to Hollywood, more ambitious to work with the big American actors and directors.” Actors in their 30s, though, often still have “a real snob attitude to Hollywood: ‘Oh, gosh, Hollywood, America—we’re proper actors.’ Ralph Richardson said, ‘Television makes you famous, movies allow you to earn good money, but theatre allows you to do what you really want to do.’ So if you think that’s deep in the British actor, then you see where the snob attitude is: ‘[Screen acting] is not proper acting, is it?’ ”

You won’t find John Hubbard prescribing to that view.

“Screen acting is proper acting. When the keen actors here say, ‘What should I look at, when you say Americans are better screen actors than anybody in the world?’ I say, ‘Just get an Al Pacino film out and watch him listening; don’t watch him talking, watch him listening, because he’s listening with every fiber of his body. Nothing much is going on, but everything is going on.’ And that’s what we’re not good at. We’re getting good at it. I mean, people like Paul Bettany, people like [Ewan] MacGregor. But still, there’s more of a screen strength with most American actors compared with British actors—and I’m generalizing dreadfully—but there’s a sort of fierceness, a drive, a focus.”

In the case of casting The Lord of the Rings, though, it was imperative to director Peter Jackson that the essential Englishness of the Tolkien series was reflected in the casting, even though at the end of the day, said Hubbard, “It was the best actor [for the part]. I’m not going to say anybody has to be English, or has to be this, has to be that. The whole thing has an English flavor about it, and in the end… the majority of the characters are played by British actors.”

Even though, as the LOTR chapter of my upcoming book will discuss, L.A. casting directors Victoria Burrows and Scot Boland pulled off an unexpected coup by finding Americans for three of the most crucial leads: Elijah Wood for Frodo, Sean Astin for Samwise, and Viggo Mortensen for Aragorn.

The issue of American actors vs. English actors comes up often when a quintessentially English property is made into a film: There was a firestorm of criticism over here when Renee Zellweger was cast as Bridget Jones, though her performance eventually won over most skeptical Brits. And even though the Harry Potter franchise ended up with young English children in the leads, casting director Susie Figgis ran afoul of the film’s American producers when she told the British press that the casting was being botched by the Americans—a point of view that didn’t sit well with the seasoned L.A.-based Casting Co., whose Janet Hirshenson and Jane Jenkins ultimately did what the Brits would call a cracking job.

This sort of contention is inevitable, Hubbard confessed, because what there is of a British film industry can’t seem to pull together screen versions of their most beloved stories.

“Take the three biggest-grossing movies in the world ever in the history of film. What is the link? They’re all British: Titanic, that was a British ship that was sunk; Lord of the Rings, and Harry Potter. It’s interesting that this country is so rich in material, and yet we can’t seem to exploit it. It takes Americans to come in with money, with drive, with development skills, to just do it, get it on the screen, make a lot of money. It just kills me about the British film industry—how snobby we are, how we’re shite at developing anything, shite at recognizing at what a good writer is. We seem to recognize and make movies with bad writers. I mean, surely there’s some good writers out there.”

We’re not sure which “bad writers” he’s talking about, as we in America typically only get to see the better British films and television, from writers like Dennis Potter, Mike Leigh, Ben Elton, Lynda LaPlante, John Mortimer, and Jennifer Saunders, to name but a few I’ve enjoyed over the years. And none of those are blockbuster names, by any stretch.

There is one other striking difference between the Brits and the Americans in the area of casting, though. Victoria Burrows told me that while she usually would not welcome actors showing up in wardrobe at her casting office, she was more indulgent in the case of Lord of the Rings, because the material was so special to so many of the auditioning actors, and that kind of commitment turned out to be worthy of the project. I wondered if Hubbard had any Tolkien-heads show up at his office dressed as elves or hobbits.

“No, you never, ever turn up in wardrobe to a British casting, where in America, it’s quite common. There was a wonderful story about an English director casting in Hollywood; he was casting a cricket commercial. So the brief was, he wanted two batsmen. And he turns up to the casting and there’s a room full of people wearing masks and capes—they thought it was Batman.”

Bad form, as the English might say.

Tap-Dancing Trailer Trash Opera

If, as Hubbard lamented, it takes Americans to exploit the great British material for the screen, the reverse phenomenon might be true of the theatre. The sensation of London’s West End is Jerry Springer—the Opera, a brilliantly executed and blisteringly irreverent spoof from composer/lyricist Richard Thomas (not to be confused with John Boy) and Stewart Lee.

It’s slated to invade Broadway in October, and the only way I can imagine it won’t be a runaway hit there is if it’s not cast just right, as it is at the West End’s Cambridge Theatre. The London cast, which has only a few token Americans in it, includes first-rate operatic singers, most of whom can also tap-dance, as well as act the parts of assorted freaks and trailer trash. Ever seen a triple-threat casting notice that called for all those skills? We wish the producers luck in New York.

Another big musical that just made its way to Broadway is the Andrew Lloyd Webber-produced Bombay Dreams, which is apparently meant to ride the wave of Bollywood chic with its story of a Bombay slum kid rising to the top of the Indian film industry and forgetting his roots. The music, not by Webber but by over-employed Indian film composer A.K. Rahman, is plenty authentic, as is the talented London cast. But though the producers have boasted about some reworking en route to Broadway, the rendition that’s up here in London is a silly, pandering, inconsequential mess that has a few lively dances but is otherwise a minstrel-like embarrassment for the South Asian performers onstage. Not even great casting could overcome that.

Hare on Selway

One measure of how much more mainstream the theatre is in London culture was an obituary I spotted last Monday in one of the town’s major daily papers. When I was in charge at Back Stage West, we ran loving obituaries of casting directors when they died; I remember having Luis Alfaro write an appreciation of the Mark Taper Forum’s longtime CD Stanley Soble. And there were others, from Barbara Miller to Elisabeth Luestig.

Well, there in The Guardian was an obit for Mary Selway, a distinguished casting director whose work I had noted with particular admiration on the Robert Altman film Gosford Park. The obit went on to inform me that she worked for years at the Royal Court theatre in the 1970s, and went on to become one of the preeminent film casting directors, particularly for visiting Americans such as Altman, Spielberg, Clint Eastwood, Sydney Pollack, and Fred Zinnemann, and for such compatriots and other foreign directors as Bertrand Tavernier, Ridley Scott, Fred Schepisi, Nicholas Roeg, Mike Newell, and Roger Michell. The only titles listed apart from Gosford Park were a pretty impressive roster of casting credits: Schindler’s List, Out of Africa, Master and Commander, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Withnail and I, and Notting Hill.

Oh, and one more film: Plenty. That should have clued me in, for when I got to the end of a lovely, well-turned piece that captured Mary’s personality and convictions quite appreciatively, I saw that the author of the obit was no less than David Hare, among the stage and screen’s most prolific dramatists, who was the writer and director of Plenty, which starred Meryl Streep amid a cast of Brits.

Ye Olde Actors’ Trade Paper

Another of Hare’s plays, the two-hander Skylight, had a first-rate production at the Taper about six or seven years ago, starring the Scottish actor Brian Cox. I was impressed that an interview with Cox (now probably best known for his appearances in X-Men and the upcoming Troy) in the London actors’ trade The Stage actually mentioned that Los Angeles credit.

The Stage is the area’s equivalent of Back Stage West, I suppose, and like that L.A. staple, it’s not only about theatre. I must say, though, that with its mix of breaking news, plentiful and meaty casting ads, unflashy layout, and slightly old-fogey columns, it reminded me a bit more of New York’s venerable Back Stage than of its L.A. sister. (Although The Stage also carries a column called “Dear John” that’s a lot like Back Stage West’s old Tombudsman or its current “Ask Jack”.)

Last week’s issue had a special ad-supported section on lookalike/soundalike bands, apparently a big business here. The most popular are Abba knockoffs, but I also saw quite a few Beatles, Robbie Williams, Elton John, and Rat Pack troupes. There are acts replicating Kylie Minogue, Madonna, Cher, George Michael, and something called the “Mock Horror Picture Show.”

Also while I’ve been here, I’ve watched a bit of English reality TV, and friends here tell me that everything on the telly these days seems to be a gardening or cooking how-to show.

Remind me again: Why exactly are the English snobs about American culture? The Indian food here is a bit better, I’ll give them that.

Next week: New York City, just like I picture it—traffic and everything.