Tess Sanchez on the loss of the casting director, write a book

“We decided to go in a different direction” was that the standard director of the Hollywood casting, Tess Sanchez, delivered for more than 20 years. After the hearings, the sentence served as a slight disappointment for the actors. Then, in 2020, Sanchez ended up at the reception of the rejection after losing his beloved job. Rather than submitting to defeat, Sanchez transformed career lemons into a literary lemonade and began to document his many funny, scandalous, absurd and poignant experiences; A feat that led to his new test book, “we decided to go in a different direction.”

Sanchez says that writing his first book following the job loss was “very therapeutic. I had a lot to work, and although when I finished, I felt like it was a complete story, I didn't feel like I was ready to start a new chapter. I always try to understand. “”

For those who hope for Hollywood gossip or the name of the names, they will not find it in the memories of Sanchez. Rather than real names, she often applies her eye as a casting director to whom this person would be represented in a film to allow readers to imagine the scenario as a film scene: she describes a unaccompanied boyfriend as resembling Topher Grace, then he becomes “Topher”. And at one point, Sanchez describes himself as Jennifer Lopez while her friends look like Jessica Biel and Selena Gomez.

She said at the time: “My conviction is that once a casting director, still a casting director. I tend to do it in my private life too because that's how my brain works. … I love being a contamous, and I think it's sort of casting someone or her boyfriend. I love to install people. “

Tess Sanchez's husband, actor Max Greenfield, wrote the introduction of his new book, which is dedicated to him.

(Amy Sussman / Getty Images)

However, his own love story was not a configuration. His marriage to “New Girl” and the actor of the “district” Max Greenfield in 2008 and the births of their daughter Lilly and his son Ozzie drew media attention, but it is relatively rare for the duo. Greenfield and Sanchez managed to remain largely outside the spotlight. The real worship between the two is a fundamental part of the book. Greenfield wrote the introduction and the book is dedicated to him. Like a Rom -Com in prime time, their meeting in a bar and the romance that followed, the out -of -together romance, is detailed with love at the beginning of the Memoirs, including their rupture, their meeting, the passage of Greenfield's rehabilitation for dependence – a game changer for both – and a possible marriage.

Indeed, her husband, her parents and her career are the foundations of many stories, but “the real jumping place in the book is the place where I was released from my work,” she explains. This seismic event took place at home, while Greenfield plunged into the kitchen. Sanchez was in front of her laptop where she expected a standard recording meeting. Instead, she was dismissed.

“It has a kind of training effect on almost all the relationships of my life, including my husband and my children.”

As vice-president of talents and casting at WB from 2000 to 2007, Sanchez was essential in the cast of “Felicity”, “Dawson's Creek”, “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”, “Smallville” and “Supernatural”. She writes on her beginnings as a temperature, looking at her boss, the casting director, predict with precision that the emerging talents Shia Labeouf, Channing Tatum, Jessica Chastain and Amy Adams would be stars one day. Sanchez then worked at Fox from 2009 to 2020, as a casting vice-president of casting during the end of his time with the network. From “Brooklyn nine-nine” to “The Mindy Project”, she played a decisive role in the casting of household favorites for more than a decade.

During the final of his race in Fox, Sanchez was the manager of the oldest senior programming and the only woman of color in a senior creative management position. Losing the job that had defined his identity for most of his adult life was naturally brilliant.

It takes seven chapters to lead to the overwhelming event. Sanchez details the zoom meeting in which she was tabled without ceremony, leaving her so amazed that she could repeat was: “So that's how my story ends.”

“It looked like ultimate betrayal; I believe that the term is “blind”, explains Tess Sanchez about the loss of his job at the head of the casting at Fox Entertainment.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

She writes: “I cannot minimize the reality of my feelings that day or my disproportionate response. It looked like ultimate betrayal; I believe that the term is “blind”. I was invested in my work – some could say too much – but I was so deeply invested in the compulsory relations that I had built there.

After the shooting, she said at the time, she was “a different friend, a different sister, a different girl”.

She adds: “The essence of the book really concerns my journey to try to understand why this particular work was so defined in my life, and who am I without this work? I had to look at my career because when he left, I felt so empty and which allowed me to return to the beginning and to dig and revise how I started in the book.”

Readers do not need to have a foot in the entertainment industry to tell. The loss of jobs and the main events of life are universal. Sanchez remembers the multiple meetings she had with the publishers to present her memoirs two years ago in the wake of mass post-payment job losses.

“Each meeting, someone there raised their hands and said,” It happened to my friend “or” who arrived at my husband “. This is the loss of a job with which you really identify yourself and what you lose something like that.

Sanchez says that it remains open to future opportunities in the entertainment industry, but it also looks at a second book, although it does not disclose details. The role of an author is not such a jump from that of a casting director: transmitting a story, exploring the dynamics between the characters and recognizing an elusive chemistry between them.

“I think that the gift of being a casting director gives another human being to show you who he is and to take up all these really important human aspects that allow someone to be really a good storyteller,” she says. “A casting director hires an actor to be the ship in this story and there is nothing better than sitting in front of someone in a room and having really an idea of ​​whom he is.”

Anecdotes and reflections in her first book could not offer a full portrait of Sanchez, but they capture a moment and a place where she got in the ranks of Hollywood, and working with big budgets and stars was her daily life. She deplores that Hollywood's “apogee”, like her work, is a relic of the past.

She says: “Post Pandemic, then the strike, then the horrible the Fire, the industry really made blows. Hollywood had its peak, and I was part of this while I was showing up, and there was nothing like behind the scenes, promoting for this book is a little uncomfortable, but I am completely open and excited, which is going on.