You see it onscreen every time you watch a movie or a TV show: "Casting by." But what does that actually mean? Jen Euston, who just won an Emmy for her casting work on Orange Is the New Black, was kind enough to explain the process to Cosmopolitan.com. In addition to her award-winning work on OINTB, Jen casts Girls (she found Hannah's soul mate/tormenter in Adam Driver) and has done work on TV shows like Veep and Inside Amy Schumer as well as movies including Bachelorette and Sleepwalk With Me. Having been in the business for nearly 20 years, Jen knows a few things about how to break into a notoriously difficult business. If you're interested in becoming a future inmate of Litchfield though, don't show up to her office unannounced — she's by appointment only.

How do you keep track of so many actors? Do you watch a ton of TV, or do you have a mental Rolodex?
It's my brain. I know it sounds strange, but I've been tracking actors since I was so young. I would fall in love with people like Jim Carrey. I saw him in Once Bitten and In Living Color and was obsessed with him. By the time I got to college, Ace Ventura: Pet Detective came out and all my friends called me. They were like, "That guy that you always talked about is in the biggest movie of the weekend." I'm like, "I know." I had that happen a lot growing up, because I'd be like, "This person is not famous, but there's something there." And then I was able to transition that into a career, which isn't very common.

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Jen Euston with Natasha Lyonne

How did you transition it into a career?
As soon as I got to be a teenager and realized I could actually work in film and television, that's what I planned on doing. I didn't know if I wanted to be an editor or a script supervisor, [but] I always knew I was going to be behind the camera. I was not interested in acting, ever, ever, ever ... Stage fright. I went to NYU for cinema studies.

What was your first job in casting?
While I was still in college, I did a semester interning in LA at Universal Television and a casting director there, Megan Branman, took me under her wing and showed me how to do everything. When I got back to New York, [Megan] called the only TV show that was in New York at the time (at least the only one Universal made), Law and Order. She called the casting director over there and said, "I have a girl who I trained, so if you need an assistant, you can just hire her." And they did! I did that for a year.

Eventually you decided to break out on your own — why?
I lived in LA for a year and I worked for another casting director for television, Meg Liberman. That was kind of like going to graduate school for casting. But I missed my baby nephew Dylan too much because he was 6 months old when I left. I came home, moved 10 minutes away from my sister, and decided that after about almost nine years of doing assistant/associate work, you have to go out on your own. It's like taking a leap off a cliff. You can't open a newspaper for want ads of casting directors. There are no job sites or anything. It's all by recommendation or word of mouth. I had to turn down a couple of associate jobs and say, "Nope, I'm a casting director now." You have to proclaim yourself. Slowly, I was able to start forming all these relationships on my own.

When you're casting for a TV show or movie, do you ever have to think about how many viewers that person will draw?
I hate casting someone in a part just because they're a star, and I try to avoid it at all costs. If they're a star and they're right for the part, that's one thing. If you're just hiring them because they bring money or viewers or whatever, that's really hard for me to come to terms with because, for me, that's not a creative thing, it's more about the bottom line.

I've been so lucky with both Girls and Orange Is the New Black because we cast the best people for the part. That's what attracted me to the jobs, because they told me, "We don't need any names for this." If I get approached by a project and they're like, "Well, we need names," I'm like, "You probably need to find someone else, because I'm not going to be your girl and I'll be resentful and you don't want that."

For someone like Laverne Cox on OITNB, who has a twin brother who could play Sophia pre-transition — that seems like a crazy needle in a haystack. How did that happen?
It's luck! It's divine intervention. That's exactly what I called it. I knew Laverne before I cast the show. I had brought her in for other stuff before. She was the person I envisioned when I read the script. There's not a huge population of transgender actors or transgender actors of color [who are also] in New York. But Sophia was so feisty and Laverne is so amazing and has such a great attitude. I just knew that it was a good match. And I know her agent very well — he called me. I didn't put a breakdown out for the pre-transition Sophia — a breakdown is what we put out to agents and managers to let them know what we're looking for in an episode, and I had not done that. But her agent called me and said, "Jen, I have to tell you something. Laverne has an identical twin brother." And I was like, "No." I go, "Well, what does he do? Does he act?" And he's like, "No, I think he DJs and stuff." I'm like, "I don't care. Get him in here tomorrow. This is too good to be true."

It was so amazing and it was so perfect. Again, divine intervention. I would have cast somebody that looked like Laverne but it would have been a challenge because she's so beautiful and trying to envision her as a man is all very complicated. I was fortunate in that it just kind of fell in my lap.

Have you ever cried watching an audition?
Sure. I mean, I've never started bawling during an audition. But there are actors that move me, for sure. I tend to stay away from the really overdramatic things [because] it can be very depressing, casting a drama. When I was in my 20s and I worked for Ellen [Lewis, a veteran casting director who frequently works with Martin Scorsese], we worked on a lot of very serious, intense movies, and it was hard every day, taking that with you — really heavy scenes that you had to do all day long. So it was sort of an intentional thing when I became a casting director, that I wanted to do things that were not so heavy or depressing, because I wanted to not end my day like, Oh my God.

I know recently there's been a push to get casting its own category at the Oscars. What would you say to people who think casting directors don't actually do that much?
That they have to educate themselves on what a casting director's role in a film is. Casting [happens] behind closed doors, that's the whole thing. And it should be that way — it is private, and we need to keep it private because these are people's lives and there are human beings involved. So it's a very hard argument. But, for example, my old boss Ellen, she's amazing. She's cast every Martin Scorsese movie since Goodfellas. And every single movie that Marty makes is cast beautifully and well. There's a pattern there. It's not by chance or luck.

There's a lot of creative energy and work being done by somebody assembling a cast in the right way and serving a director's vision. Just like a costume designer does, or a set decorator does, or any of those jobs that all have Oscars — they show their director choices, just like we show our directors choices. It's the same process, so the fact that we don't get recognized doesn't make any sense. It's like, what's the difference if a costume designer is showing you five different choices for the leading lady's dress and us showing you five different choices for the leading lady? It's contradictory.

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