The Art of Saying Yes: John Papsidera at the Nashville Film Festival

Before John Papsidera cast The Dark Knight, Oppenheimer or Wednesday, he was an actor. One of his last auditions was for a Diet Pepsi commercial spoofing Top Gun, which required him to sit in a mock fighter jet cockpit surrounded by seven cameras. He walked out knowing on-camera acting wasn't for him.

"I didn't have the confidence or the wherewithal to allow a camera to study me," Papsidera told the audience at the National Museum of African American Music on Friday. "To peer into my soul. It takes a huge amount of courage and guts to do that. I didn't have it."

He had the training. Papsidera earned a BFA from Florida State University and went on to postgraduate study at Circle in the Square in New York. He spent the next several years running restaurants in New York, London and Los Angeles before finding his way to his calling.

His credits now span more than 200 film and television projects, including nearly every Christopher Nolan film from Memento through this summer's The Odyssey. In 2025, the Casting Society of America gave him its Hoyt Bowers Award for his body of work, and with Best Casting finally a category at the Academy Awards, The Odyssey could put him in the Oscar conversation next spring. He's also a neighbor: he and his wife built a home in College Grove, and he spends most of his time in Middle Tennessee unless a job needs him in Los Angeles.

At TV Intelligentsia, we spend a lot of time thinking about the stories on our screens and the people who shape them. Few people shape them more quietly than a casting director. Here's what stood out from his hour on stage.

"It's about saying yes"

Papsidera got his start as an assistant at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, and he credits theater with shaping his whole philosophy. LA theater could land brand-new actors and established stars who could afford to do a play, but the middle tier of working actors was harder to reach. That gap forced him to go looking. The Taper held open calls once a month, and anyone could sign up.

"It made you search for new talent," he said. "It made you be open to people."

He's quick to point out that the old Hollywood story of an unknown getting discovered by chance, spotted at a lunch counter and whisked off to a screen test, rarely happens. Discovery takes a village of agents, managers, and people who saw somebody in a play and made a phone call. Charlize Theron's first significant role came in 2 Days in the Valley, which Papsidera cast with Mindy Marin, because a manager called to say she'd been standing behind a six-foot Scandinavian woman in a bank line and asked whether he'd meet her. He said yes.

"A lot of casting directors aren't open to that," he said. "I think saying yes is important, and great people come from all kinds of places."

Dunkirk is one of his favorite projects for exactly that reason. Fionn Whitehead was completely new, and Barry Keoghan and Jack Lowden were "just guys coming in to audition" before their careers took off.

Nobody wanted to be in Austin Powers

It's hard to believe now, but Papsidera said the cast of the first Austin Powers was a slog to assemble. Mike Myers was coming off So I Married an Axe Murderer, which hadn't landed, and he was "literally begging people to do the movie." The film became a launching pad for comedians from Second City, the improv scene, and the Groundlings, and, he said, it was Will Ferrell's first movie. It was also the first film Papsidera cast on his own.

He laughed about what happened next. The original became a hit, and suddenly everyone wanted into the sequel, cameos and all.

His company, Automatic Sweat, launched in 2000 after a partnership fell apart. The name came from an unhoused man who used to spend time outside Papsidera's office and once told him, "Life ain't nothing but an automatic sweat." Papsidera figured truer words had never been spoken, and the phrase stuck.

Working with Christopher Nolan

The same producers from Austin Powers sent him a strange little script called Memento. He laughed as he admitted he had to read it three times before he understood what was going on. Nolan didn't know many American actors yet, so his instruction was simple: bring me your favorite actors. The whole casting process took about three weeks.

Nearly 25 years later, Papsidera spoke warmly about the loyalty and shorthand the two have built. Many of Nolan's familiar faces, he said, came out of that shorthand. Early on, Papsidera would float an idea, and Nolan would answer that they already had Michael Caine, and who's better than Michael Caine? Papsidera was also candid that Nolan likes to know exactly what an actor will bring, and he described his job as finding the precise piece that fits a vision Nolan has already built in his head. Papsidera said with a laugh that he's never quite lived down bringing in the famously unpredictable Crispin Glover for Memento.

He also shared a piece of Dark Knight history that drew gasps. Papsidera said the Joker was first sent to Leonardo DiCaprio. Joaquin Phoenix met with them and explained that he didn't want to do big movies, which Papsidera called ironic given that Phoenix later won an Oscar for playing the same character. Then they met Heath Ledger.

"It was exhilarating," he said. Ledger understood the role had nothing to do with filling Jack Nicholson's shoes. His Joker was an anarchist who wanted to tear everything down.

That electric feeling in a room is what keeps Papsidera in the business. "The idea of being in the room with an artist is the thing that keeps me coming back," he said. "It's where magic meets practicality."

600 auditions for one role, and a level playing field

The scale of modern casting came into focus when Papsidera talked about Scooby-Doo: Origins, the live-action Netflix series about how Mystery Inc. first came together at summer camp. He estimated his team saw around 600 young actors per role. The series is set to premiere on Netflix in 2027.

At one point a studio executive wasn't sold on one of the actors. Papsidera told him flatly that he was wrong. Afterward, the executive wrote to say Papsidera had been completely right. Papsidera was clear that he only felt free to push that hard because of the trust he'd built with that same executive on Wednesday. Relationships, he said, are what give a casting director room to fight for someone.

Self-tapes are what make numbers like 600 possible, and Papsidera sees both sides. Before tapes, casting directors under deadline pressure leaned on a trusted circle of maybe 40 to 100 actors they knew would deliver. Those actors have been displaced the most, and they're the ones complaining. His answer was blunt: they had an advantage for a long time, and now the ground is more level.

What gets lost is the chance to give an actor a note in the room, along with the relationships built over years of in-person auditions. His team makes up for part of that by asking promising actors to retape with a specific adjustment.

His advice to actors who dread self-tapes is to flip the script. "You have control in a tape session," he said. "You get to do it a thousand times if you want. It's not a producer on a cell phone. It's not someone that sneezes in the middle of your best line. Actors do not get a chance to be powerful enough. When you have that opportunity, embrace it rather than fight it."

He did offer one warning to the industry side. Producers and studios have started treating a phone-shot tape as a finished performance. "It is reference material," he said. Directing is still the director's job. That matters even more for comedy, which he said is harder to pull off on tape than in a room, where a casting director can feel someone's natural humor and toss them a new direction to see if they can take it.

The one thing he'd give every actor

Papsidera once taught an acting-for-the-camera class at Florida State. When the semester ended, he asked himself what single thing he'd give those students if he could. His answer was confidence, which he acknowledged is telling from a man who stepped away from acting because he didn't have it.

"It truly is what separates the wheat from the chaff," he said. "Producers feel it, directors feel it. They want somebody they can trust."

He used to tell students to go into the bathroom before an audition and strike a Superman pose in the mirror, or do whatever helps them walk in feeling steady. Confidence, in his definition, isn't cockiness or faking it. It's finding a sense of peace inside yourself. He also wants actors to come in with real choices and a few alternatives ready. When an actor asks to go again, he encourages directors to say yes, and he hopes the actor shows them something different the second time. Not a wild swing, just evidence of a professional who can adjust.

As a school psychologist, this is the part I'd underline. A steady pre-audition ritual is a genuinely useful tool, and people consistently report feeling more confident after striking a power pose, even though the research on the pose changing body chemistry hasn't held up. What Papsidera is really describing is someone who knows who they are before they walk through the door. For most of us, that kind of confidence starts forming long before any audition, every time we make a choice, try again, and learn that our effort matters more than the outcome.

A home without faces

Near the end of the conversation, Papsidera talked about his art collection and shared a detail his wife noticed before he did. Almost every portrait he owns has a blurred or obscured face. After a lifetime of studying faces all day, his home has become a place where he gets to stop judging. "A piece of art that I love, I can just enjoy," he said.

Living in Tennessee has shifted his perspective on the industry, too. He's grown convinced that most of the country simply doesn't care about the priorities Hollywood obsesses over, and that entertainment is supposed to be made for everybody. He's glad to see Nashville working to grow its film industry, and he'd much rather see productions spread across the United States than leave the country for tax credits.

For someone who once couldn't bear to let a camera study him, Papsidera has built a remarkable career making sure the right person ends up in front of one. His advice holds up whether you're a first-time actor or a working professional: say yes, make a choice, and walk in knowing who you are.

Keep up with TV Intelligentsia

For more conversations about film, television, and the people who make them, follow TV Intelligentsia at @tvintelligentsia. You can also find Cordelia Witty, school psychologist and co-founder of TVI Kidz, at @cordeliatv__.