The BBC's 'Lord of the Flies' Promises To Introduce a New Generation of British Talent
Every actor cites two rules as they break them: Never work with children or animals. The theory behind this statement is that working with either requires working with someone who cannot yet fully understand they are acting. But what if the adaptation you're undertaking is a child-centric series? It's a problem that's only become more prevalent in the current century, with the rise of YA novels adapted for the screen increase. Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, and His Dark Materials are three examples of books where the protagonists are practically prepubescent, and all three handled the situation in the same way: Cast relatively unknown kids and then give the adult roles to the best A-list talent the British have, in hopes the latter help teach the former. But these stories at least have adult characters to cast. For BBC's newest undertaking, Lord of the Flies, there are no adults; in fact, that's the entire premise of the story.
For Harry Potter's child cast, worldwide auditions were held, and director Christopher Columbus was instrumental in finding Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, Matthew Lewis, et al. In His Dark Materials, the starring role was a nepotism hire; Daphne Keene's father, Will Keene, also played a significant role in the series. However, neither had nearly the same ratio of child to adult characters as Game of Thrones nor did either of those franchises ask their underage cast to go through anything close to the types of traumatic scenes that Thrones did, and that's with the show aging up half the characters. Lucky for that series, it had a secret weapon: casting director Nina Gold, whose 30 years of credits include everything from Vera Drake to the latest trilogy of Star Wars films. Along the way, she has launched the on-screen careers of Emma Corrin (The Crown), Tom Holland (Wolf Hall), Rosalind Eleazar (Harlots), Indira Varma and Tobias Menzies (Rome), and Daisy Ridley.
In most cases, when most of the cast is full of unknowns, there's usually at least one "name" to hang the project on — Sean Bean as Eddard Stark, for example. However, Lord of the Flies is all unknown, a gathering of Gen Alpha actors who no one has seen before, at least not in anything easily recallable. Instead, the BBC leans heavily on Gold's name as the casting director, hoping people recognize it from the articles about her.
