' I always go back to my theater book': Casting Director Lucy Bevan on F1 and The Girlfriend
There are casting directors who assemble casts, and then there are casting directors who build worlds. Lucy Bevan does the latter. In 2025 alone, she gave us the adrenaline-fueled ensemble of F1 and the quietly devastating triangle of The Girlfriend. If your year was shaped by Damson Idris going wheel-to-wheel with Brad Pitt or by Olivia Cooke and Robin Wright destroying each other with poised, poisonous smiles, you have Bevan to thank.It all began, she says, the way everything begins: with the script. “You don’t have a sense yet of the size of the film,” Bevan says of F1. “And then you realize Joshua is a huge part for a young actor.” The role required someone with gravitas and swagger, someone who could stand toe-to-toe with Brad Pitt and drive a Formula One car like his life depended on it. “We saw a lot of actors,” Bevan says. “ When you are casting a young actor in a huge breakout role, you really want to make sure you’ve seen everybody.”Which is how Damson Idris ended up being auditioned on a racetrack. As in: real car, real track, real driving. He had already taken lessons, being, as Bevan says, “the smart, ambitious, clever, well-prepared actor that he is.” And after the driving test, he turned to her and said, “Your turn.” Reader, Bevan got behind the wheel. The specificity of the world meant other auditions got unconventional, too. For Callie Cooke’s role as mechanic Jodie, they brought actresses into a working garage to see if they could change a wheel. “She nailed it,” Bevan says. She had seen Cooke years earlier in her first play out of drama school, another reminder that casting directors are always playing the long game.If F1 was a feat of physical casting, The Girlfriend required something more delicate: tone. Robin Wright, who directed the series and also stars, auditioned actors alongside Bevan. “She was incredibly generous to the actors,” Bevan says. “I want actors to leave an audition feeling like they’ve done their best, whether they get the part or not.” The man both women are fighting over (Laura’s son and Cherry’s partner) had to win over the audience without ever coming across as milquetoast. Laurie Kynaston “came in, and he was so gorgeous and intelligent and funny and got it. You can never think that he’s a loser for being so attached to his mom and that he’s being bossed around by his girlfriend. It’s a very difficult part to play, but he’s incredibly smart, Laurie.”And Olivia Cooke and Robin Wright? A match made in psychological tension heaven. “They loved each other,” Bevan says, which perhaps explains why the onscreen venom feels like two actresses savoring the taste of exquisite wine rather than forcing sharpness. That’s the difference between cruelty and craft.Bevan lights up most when discussing how actors move through the audition process. “I wish every actor knew we want you to do your best. We want to cast you,” she says. Someone may not be right today, and then perfectly right two years from now. She mentions Simon Kunz, who came in for something else entirely and wound up cast in F1 without a scheduled audition. “ He didn’t even come in for the part, and he got the part,” she says. “Just go for it, you never know what it may lead to.”Check out the rest of the interviews on Meet Me at Crafty Here: https://atcrafty.substack.com/Be sure to follow Crafty on Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/meetatcrafty
