Game of Thrones fans are hoping to find out on Monday whether Jon Snow is really dead. Nina Gold, keeper of some of the most valuable secrets in showbusiness, already knows.
The casting director on Game of Thrones, Star Wars and Wolf Hall, Gold is the unseen force behind a string of hit TV shows and films.
Casting directors are among the most powerful figures in TV and film, able to make or break careers, but their world remains a secretive one (albeit not quite as closed as the Faith Militant).
Everyone knows what directors do, most people know what producers do, but how casting directors operate is a little more opaque.
“It’s a bit of a mystery to me,” laughs Gold. “It’s quite an ineffable sort of thing. It’s a lot about instinct and feeling, combined with analysis of people’s qualities and essences, and somehow marrying them up with the needs of the character.”
Bafta will attempt to put that right on Sunday when Gold becomes the first casting director to receive one of its special prizes at the academy’s TV craft awards.
It recognises Gold’s involvement in an extraordinary number of hits in film (The Imitation Game, The Martian, The Theory of Everything) and on TV (London Spy, The Fall, Netflix’s forthcoming royal epic, The Crown).
The role is rarely recognised in TV or film awards on either side of the Atlantic. “It’s incredibly unfair isn’t it?” she says. “It’s the undefinable nature of what one is doing that is the problem, I guess.”
It was Gold who made household names out of John Boyega and Daisy Ridley, the young stars who play Finn and Ray in JJ Abrams’s Star Wars sequel, The Force Awakens.
Gold will cast the young Han Solo in the spinoff origin film (will it be Taron Egerton? “I don’t think we have a new Han Solo yet. Not today”) and knows what really happens to Jon Snow. Wasn’t Kit Harington’s long hair a dead giveaway?
“It could just be for Doctor Faustus [in which Harington is starring on the London stage],” says Gold. “He could be back in it with no hair. Anything could happen.”
She is “incredibly proud” of Boyega and his co-star Ridley. “Boy did they rise to the occasion,” she says. “It’s an incredible achievement for two young actors to get into it and just own it the way they did.”
Gold says it was a “pinch yourself” moment to be involved in the rebooted sci-fi saga, and happened to first meet Abrams on Star Wars Day (4 May). “It was all completely great and amazing,” she adds.
She also cast the first ever female villain in the Star Wars franchise, with Gwendoline Christie (Game of Thrones’ Brienne of Tarth) as chrome-clad stormtrooper Captain Phasma in the new film.
Asked if when she cast Christie she was making a statement about gender bias in TV and film, Gold says: “To be honest that wasn’t a moment … we were just trying to think of somebody who would be good in the part.
“I think everyone had assumed it would be a man and we suddenly thought Gwendoline would be great and she was. They were completely open to it and hopefully it will go further.
“There are some instances when you say, ‘why does this character have to be a man?’, and if there’s not a really good reason then one should try to keep an open mind,” she adds. “You can’t always get people to take you up on it.”
Diversity, or rather the lack of it, has increasingly become a focus of industry attention, not least the number of high profile roles going to public school-educated stars such as Benedict Cumberbatch, Eddie Redmayne and Damian Lewis. Gold has cast all three of them, in The Imitation Game, Theory of Everything and Wolf Hall respectively.
“These things go in little phases, probably. On British TV we have a lot of period stuff which brings questions of class into play,” says Gold.
“The top British male actors of today, Dominic West, Eddie Redmayne, Benedict Cumberbatch and Damian Lewis are all Eton or Harrow. But then you’ve also got Tom Hardy, Michael Fassbender – not English but we want him to be – and James McAvoy, they’re not that and they are also right up there and incredibly brilliant.
“A few years ago it was Gary Oldman and Tim Roth and those people. I don’t know if it’s as massively significant as it’s cracked up to be.”
Game of Thrones has also been criticised for its lack of diversity.
“I think we have cast Game of Thrones in the way that is true to the source material,” is Gold’s response. “The books are very detailed about each family and the way they look and their individual cultures and dynasties.”
On the broader issue of black, Asian and minority ethnic representation across the industry, Gold says: “There is still a lot to be done but I do think it is changing. It has to start with the writing, which is becoming more diverse and open to diverse casting. Things are shifting.”
Gold cast her first project at Cambridge University when she was asked to find a bunch of friends with leather jackets to star in an AC/DC video.
“I thought ‘this is absolutely brilliant and what I want to do’, and one thing led to another,” she recalls. “I didn’t really have any plans, I was very immature at the time. I still haven’t got any plans past the end of this conversation.”
She went on to become a regular collaborator with film and TV veteran Mike Leigh and King’s Speech director Tom Hooper.
Wolf Hall leads the nominations for next month’s Bafta TV awards with four, including a best actor nod for its Oscar-winning star, Mark Rylance. But it took a while to convince the former Globe artistic director to come on board the BBC2 show co-starring Claire Foy and Damian Lewis, and directed by Peter Kosminsky.
“We had been trying to get Mark Rylance to do it for about two years and eventually he said yes,” Gold says. “He’s just incredibly busy and likes doing his theatre. These are big decisions and his life is booked up very far ahead.”
• Nina Gold will be with the Bafta special award at this year’s British Academy Television Craft Awards on Sunday at The Brewery, London
