How they landed their dream roles...

hollywood diaries

Demetrius Shipp Jr., ‘All Eyez on Me ‘

Shipp had heard it before — that he looked like Tupac Shakur. Then an online casting call for a biopic of the rapper was posted in 2011. Reluctant to try out for his first acting job, Shipp submitted a tape at the last minute and his father — Demetrius Shipp Sr., who had produced Shakur’s single ‘Toss It Up’ — shared it with L T Hutton, a producer on the movie. The younger Shipp had won an audition.

“They’re taking pictures,” Shipp recalled. “They’re like ‘All right, start losing weight.’ And they’re giving me all these Tupac videos to study. I went bald and got my nose pierced for real.” Then he stopped hearing from them — until 2012, and was asked to audition again. “So I did,” he said, “the same process of reading with the new casting agency and going on camera. And guess what — no more calls.”

2013: “Come read — we’re back at it,” they told him. Silence.

2014: Exact same thing.

So when asked to return in 2015, he replied: “No way, dude.” But his mother said: “You have to go. This could really be it now.”

She was right. Shipp enrolled in acting classes and lost weight in preparation for a June shoot that year. But, yep, silence — until August when he was asked to read one more time for the director he thought he had previously blown away. Then in September, Shipp saw a casting call for the part. “Oh wow, I’ve dedicated my life to try to get this role, and this is how I find out that I didn’t get it?” he thought.

A mere formality, he was reassured. On November 18, 2015, Shipp learned that the role was officially his.


Steve Zahn, ‘War for the Planet of the Apes’

I got a call from my agent saying, ‘They’re really interested in you for Planet of the Apes,’ and of course I was immediately really interested because it’s like getting a call saying, ‘Hey, you can be in a movie that you watched as a kid.’” A Skype meeting was set with director Matt Reeves. “I remember thinking, ‘OK, do I do the whole chimpanzee thing? Yeah, I’ll do like 50%.’ It was just bizarre.

“I missed ape camp” — training where actors focus on movement — and instead worked with movement choreographer Terry Notary. “I assumed that immediately it would be very technical and he’d be showing me how to quadruped. And instead we just talked about the essence of chimpanzees and these minute things they do, and I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is going to be a lot harder than I thought.’”

Tom Holland, ‘Spider-Man: Homecoming’

Holland, who had learned gymnastics for the title role of Billy Elliot in London, had been a fan of Spider-Man since he was a kid. So when he saw that Marvel was rebooting the series, he begged his agent to ask for an audition. Two days later, he was asked to self-tape an audition, then another one and read Spider-Man’s lines. But the film’s casting people swore they weren’t auditioning him for the role. “I was a little confused as to why I was pretending to be Spider-Man if I wasn’t auditioning for him,” Holland said. And during that second self-tape, he did as many back flips as he could. “I was like, ‘Hello, my name is Tom Holland,’ back flip. ‘I’m 5-foot-8,’ side flip. ‘I’m 20 years old,’ back flip. It was just a way for me to get ahead of the crowd and try to get up to the big dogs here at Marvel.”

He flipped his way through five more self-tapes, and finally landed in a screen test opposite Chris Evans, aka Captain America. “They had me do a fight scene, and basically I just went to town and did as many back flips as I could possibly do,” he said. “It was amazing fun and I was lucky enough that they cast me.”

Amandla Stenberg, ‘Everything, Everything’

Though Stenberg has a starring role this year, what first made moviegoers sit up was her turn as Rue, the sympathetic young tribute in The Hunger Games. “I called my agent over and over and over again and said: ‘Look, I know they’re making an adaptation of my favourite book, and there’s a character in this book who is 12 years old and black.’ And that was actually a huge rarity, to find a character like that who was meaningful to the story.”

The first audition went well and the casting director told her to dress up like Rue for the callback with the director, Gary Ross. “I went all in, covering myself in mud and twigs and leaves,” she remembered. On the way, she and her parents stopped at a diner. When she went to the bathroom, a woman asked her, ‘Do you need help?’ And I said, ‘I’m OK — don’t worry.’” Then it was on to meet Ross. “I basically rolled around in my backyard and then showed up at his very nice house. And I had to be very careful when I arrived to not stain any of his furniture or leave a mud trail.”

It worked. Besides showing her dedication, “by the end of it, everyone in the room was crying. They basically told me on the spot that the role was mine.”