Spoiler Warning: This article contains plot details, including some spoilers, for “Materialists,” playing in theaters now.
“Materialists,” Celine Song‘s new film, is anchored by a charming lead trio: Dakota Johnson as matchmaker Lucy, Pedro Pascal as wealthy bachelor Harry and Chris Evans as Lucy’s ex-boyfriend John. But the film opens up beyond those leads, as Lucy comes across a wide range of New Yorkers, each more eccentric than the other. Song makes each character memorable — no matter how briefly they are shown. The result is a strong and lively supporting cast made up of actors at the top of their game, who you’ll likely recognize from other roles.
And those actors are often New Yorkers in real life. That was intentional for the film’s casting director, Douglas Aibel, who also runs the New York theater company, Vineyard Theater. He wanted each actor to be “believably New York.”
“There’s just a vibrancy and an energy and life to New York actors, particularly actors who work both in theater and film and television,” Aibel, who has had an extensive career working with directors like Wes Anderson, Noah Baumbach, Marielle Heller and M. Night Shyamalan, said. “And so that was the focus, just to find a really interesting tapestry of New York personalities.”
Song, of course, also knows the theatre scene, given her background as a playwright. “I don’t want to speak for Celine, but I think someone who is theater-trained is always of great interest to directors, because they have great craft,” Aibel said.
Below, Aibel breaks down the process of casting several of the supporting characters who populate Lucy’s matchmaking world — and why each actor was right for their role.
Lucy’s Co-Workers at Adore
The matchmaking service Adore is headed by Violet, played by Marin Ireland (“Hell or High Water,” “Homeland,” “Dope Thief”). As a manager, Violent has a big personality and a lot of genuine enthusiasm. She supports Lucy through her matchmaking stumbles, and she gets serious when she needs to. Ireland “is an actress and a writer that I know very well. She’s done work in my theater company. I’ve seen her in many plays and films and theater, and what I liked again about her for it is that you could easily fall into a cliche with the boss character of being too hard edged or just too strident in some way,” Aibel said. “And I felt like she found this perfect balance of toughness and warmth. She was a very real person. She had a job to do. She wasn’t always happy with the things that she had to do, but she was both compassionate and tough at the same time.”
Throughout the film, Song is specific about the social milieus that she depicts and the types of people within them, from the phalanx of bridesmaids in the opening scene to John’s roommates to the devoted staff of young women at Adore. But the Adore employees don’t always have the frothy ideals about romance that they sell to their customers.
That comes across in Daisy, Dasha Nekrasova’s character, who conveys a certain knowing amusement with the whole thing. The “Red Scare” podcaster who appeared in “Succession” as Comfrey “has a very wry, dry quality, a dry wit about her, a cynicism. I’m not saying that she’s a cynical person, I just say that she conveys that very well,” Aibel said.
“She was someone that I felt…just naturally conveyed a New York sophistication and sensibility. And you just felt right away that it was someone you might know if you were in the fashion business or in matchmaking or such, that kind of urbane and ironic quality to her, it’s in her nature,” he added.
Lucy’s Matchmaking Clients
Zoë Winters plays Lucy’s client, Sophie.
Zoe: Zack DeZon
]Dasha: Heidi Slimane
Sophie is the client that we get to know the most throughout the film. She’s played by Zoë Winters, who “Succession” fans will recognize as Kerry and who Aibel calls a “great New York actress” acclaimed in theater. “Her first audition was one of the best ones I’ve ever seen in my life,” Aibel said.
“She just captured the humanity of this character with such grace … There’s a big emotional arc she has to play from joy to disappointment to rage, to coming to terms with the experience, and actually at the end of the day, going to Lucy for help when she needs it, and bonding with her. So it was an incredible arc for that character, required so much. And Zoe just had that ability,” Aibel added.
But the first client that viewers see is Charlotte (Louisa Jacobson), a bride having doubts about getting married. Jacobson, who is Marian Brook in “The Gilded Age” and Meryl Streep’s daughter, has also been on Aibel’s radar for a long time. He first met Jacobson when she hadn’t yet committed to acting professionally. “She auditioned for me for something, and then she decided to continue getting her college education instead of doing it. And then some years later, I saw that she had gone to grad school and was acting, and I was very impressed with her. I’ve always thought she’s remarkable, and she just did a beautiful audition,” he said.
This character required someone could find the exact right pitch. “If it’s not played correctly, the character can seem whiny and self pitying and all of that, and I thought that what she brought to it was just such honesty and you really believe that she’s torn and that she’s being frank about what she’s looking for in this relationship, and it’s a scene that’s tragicomic,” Aibel said. “She walked that line, that tightrope between comedy and tragedy, beautifully.”
“That scene, in a weird way, encapsulates sort of what the whole movie is about, in a sense. And I thought she had wonderful chemistry, also with Dakota, too,” he added.
And then there’s the funny, sharp and deeply ironic montages of Lucy’s clients. The clients as a whole paint a picture of an idiosyncratic assortment of personalities. Yet, each of them holds a narrow, hyper-specific ideal in mind for exactly what their future partner should be like.
“The approach to it was that you’d have a really interesting smorgasbord of different kinds of actors, different sensibilities, different backgrounds, just conveying the crazy range of people who come to these matchmakers with all of their expectations and demands,” Aibel said.
Crucially, these actors also needed to “make a strong impression in essentially 30 seconds or more, and we wanted all of them to feel very real,” Aibel said.
Starting with Eddie Cahill, who many will know from his TV roles, including Tag in “Friends,” Sean in “Sex and the City” and Don Flack in “CSI: NY.” “Eddie did a play at my theater many years ago when he was like, 19 years old, a Nicky Silver comedy, and he went off to be very successful in television and film. But I have always loved him,” Aibel said. “And again, we needed somebody with great skill, who could play without any trace of self-consciousness, the smugness of that character.”
Other clients include Joseph Lee as Trevor, a seemingly reasonable person who, of course, still has a very specific type: “He was superb in that he has this sweet presence, and you think he’s going to be like the one person who says, anything will be fine…But every one of these characters, no matter how they present to the world, have their own demands and needs and are sticking to it very firmly. That was something that he did very well, while remaining very charming,” Aibel said.
And Sawyer Spielberg is Mason: “That scene could be played many ways. There were guys who read for it, who were more like computer nerds … And again, I thought he just felt very real to me,” Aibel said. “He just exemplified that worldview of that character perfectly. And by the way, I didn’t know whose son he was when he auditioned.” (The actor is the son of Steven Spielberg).
John Magaro and Greta Lee in “Past Lives”
Jon Pack
And someone who Aibel didn’t cast, but who viewers might be surprised to see listed in the credits is “Past Lives” actor John Magaro. The actor doesn’t appear on camera but voices a character who seems innocent but turns out to have malevolent intentions.
Song told Variety that “I wanted it to be somebody who sounds as tender and as innocuous as possible for that role, because the thing I think is a really huge misconception is that we can tell when somebody is rapist. But the truth is that you can’t. I always feel really safe when I hear John’s voice. He’s got just the most melodic, beautiful voice, and also he’s a great actor. You actually need a great actor for that role, because of the delicate balance that it has to strike.”
Aibel also noted that “it wasn’t that recognizable voice that you go, ‘Oh, that’s so and so doing it.’”
Looking back on his experience working on “Materialists,” Aibel praises Song’s dynamic with actors. “One of the things I most respected in the audition process, because there were people also auditioning for difficult material, Charlotte and Sophie, was how respectful Celine was of the actor’s process and generous in her comments to them,” he said. “She really just had such a beautiful, natural affinity with the actors that it made my work very easy.”
Angelique Jackson contributed to this story.
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