Casting call for a new TV series, "Muscle"
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See below for a casting call from a producer looking to cast an unknown in a new project. If you are going to audition, please say Joe Fonseca at Princeton sent you!
MUSCLE
We are looking to cast a young actor for a TV series, directed by Derek Cianfrance (Blue Valentine, The Place Beyond the Pines) about a person who is going through a crisis in their life and looking to make a change through lifting weights and adding muscle and ultimately becoming a bodybuilder. The physical transformation will take place over at least two seasons.
The role we are seeking to cast is the lead, Sam, (20s) male or female or non-binary and any ethnicity.
(based upon the book by the same name)
Self-taping Audition Instructions:
State your name, height, contact information, and the city in which you reside. Also, tell us about your athletic ability, sports played, and any physical training you have done.
What is your relationship to your body?
Would you please tell us where you see yourself personally and professionally five years from now?
Please record on video your reading of the following passage from Sam Fussell’s MUSCLE.
“Bodybuilders call it ‘the disease.’ Its symptoms include a complete commitment to all matters pertaining to iron. Not the kind of iron you use to press your clothes, but the kind they use to create bulges and muscular mounds in their bodies. You find “the diseased” in bookstores hovering by the rack containing the muscle magazines (invariably adjacent to the pornography). You overhear them in vitamin stores, discussing the merits of branch-chain amino acids and protein powders. You scan them on the subway, their hypertrophied bodies a silent, raging scream of dissent. And, walking to work in the morning, you can see them through the windows of their gyms, hoisting and heaving weights in a lifting frenzy.
Most of them catch the disease during the years of adolescence. On the back pages of comic books, scrawny teens find advertisements for chest expanders and chin-up bars. For many that’s where the affair ends: in an unmailed letter or as cobwebbed, unused equipment piled in the basement. But for a few—the truly afflicted—the arrival of the equipment is just the beginning. Within a matter of months, they graduate from chest expanders to bench presses, from pull-ups to squats. Eventually, as their bodies fill out and the dream takes hold, they gravitate from distant neighborhoods to their own kind in the gyms of the city.
This was not my story.”
Be sure to label the video file with first and last names and upload the file to this Dropbox link.
We look forward to receiving your audition.
Best,
Bonnie Timmermann