The effects of the pandemic on show business.

Five years on from the Covid pandemic, we’re still wrestling with how the lockdown response to the disease changed our country, in some ways permanently. Some of those changes just added fuel to mostly unrelated embers, such as the political derangements of the George Floyd riots and “stop the steal.” Neither of those, in fact, was totally unrelated to the pandemic response: Floyd was out of work because of the lockdown, which seems to have contributed to his backsliding into drugs and passing a bad bill to make ends meet. The 2020 election conspiracy theories, meanwhile, were so powerful because of major, sudden changes to American election practices, many of them never voted on by elected legislatures.

Nate Jones at Vulture takes a fascinating look at a business you might not have thought to have been revolutionized by the pandemic: film and television casting.

Like many others in the industry, casting directors’ work has been upended by a cascade of compounding trends: a pandemic that pushed the process online and drove actors away from the coasts, executives anxious that a project will vanish into the ether, a social-media audience ready to second-guess every decision. . . . The move during COVID to digital auditions — largely self-tapes, in which an actor records, then submits themselves — opened up new possibilities. Many actors fled to cheaper cities, while the lower barrier to entry meant more people decided to enter the field. . . . “When we give actors an option of either coming in person or submitting a self-tape, 60 or 70 percent opt for the self-tapes,” says Marc Hirschfeld, head of casting for AMC Networks. This shift has brought an exponential increase in the number of actors a casting director can consider. In person, a casting director might be able to see 30 actors a day at most. Now, it’s not unusual for them to see thousands of actors from all around the world.

After George Wendt of Cheers died, I went down a rabbit hole of podcasts and interviews about the show (such as this wonderful hour-long 2024 podcast — worth the length — with Ted Danson, Woody Harrelson, and Wendt). One of the great stories is about how John Ratzenberger got cast as Cliff Clavin. The showrunners knew Wendt from an appearance on Taxi and wanted him to play Norm, but they held auditions in the meantime. Ratzenberger came in to read for the role and was bombing the audition — he wasn’t right for Norm, and everybody knew it — and he literally had one foot out the door when he turned and asked them a question: “Do you have a bar know-it-all?” And he invented the character there on the spot. That’s a testimony to a guy who’d spent enough years in the theater to have those instincts, but it’s also the kind of thing that can’t happen with a pretaped audition. So is this story that Jennifer Tilly told about the late Val Kilmer’s auditioning to play Jim Morrison in Oliver Stone’s biopic:

I was auditioning for the movie “The Doors” It was kind of a cattle call. They paired together potential Jims with potential Pamela‘s. And they were running behind so we were spilling out of the casting office, sitting on the porch, the lawn, and the driveway. All of a sudden, a sixties convertible came screeching up, blaring Doors Music at top volume. And a guy jumped out and strode inside: He had wild hair and he was barefoot, shirtless, and wearing nothing but a pair of tight leather pants. We all looked at each other like… Who is this guy? We were more than a little shook by the sheer audacity of his entrance. Well of course it was Val Kilmer and from that minute on, nobody else stood a chance.

It’s a different world now. We will spend years counting the ways.