Film Casting Agent Offers Secrets to Boston Actors

The man who helped cast Good Will Hunting shared advice about how to succeed in the film industry with a Dudley House audience last night.

Drawing from his experience as a highly regarded and well-known Boston casting agent, Kevin Fennessy told the crowd that acting and directing jobs can easily be found outside of Hollywood and New York.

According to Fennessy, most important is that Boston actors be persistent in securing a network of connections.

"How do you create a network without going out there and just doing it?" Fennessy said. "It's like any kind of networking--you must create a support group."

Fennessy attributed his success to a tireless and undying interest in film.

"I put on shows as a kid in the backyard," Fennessy said. "I'm doing the same thing now as I've always done--maybe on a different level, but still the same things."

Fennessy studied at the Boston Conservatory of Music and at York University in Toronto, Canada, where he was artistic director of the York Cabaret Theatre.

Fennessy started his casting work in 1994 at Collinger/Pickman Casting with big-name projects such as The Spanish Prisoner and A Civil Action, as well as Good Will Hunting.

In 1998, he opened his own production company called Kevin Fennessy Casting, which is allied with Christy Scott's Saint-Aire Productions and provides a wide-range of casting services.

Fennessy said he regularly applies what he learned as an actor and a small-film director to his larger productions today, such as his recent film Lift.

"It just seemed like the perfect opportunity for me to pull everything I had learned from the past together," he said.

Fennessy spoke at length about the differences between filming in Boston and filming in New York or Hollywood.

"If what you want to be is to be a star, you probably have to go somewhere else," Fennessy said. "It looks like actors in Boston don't do as much training in acting as those in New York."

But Fennessy also said there might be extra perks for Boston-based actors.

"Boston actors are getting more respect now than 10 to 15 years ago," he said.

Audience members said they enjoyed Fennessy's talk, emphasizing his wide-ranging knowledge and willingness to share it with others.

"He's pretty firm: he knows what he's talking about--a professional," audience member Christian Karl said.

"I find Kevin to be really warm and willing to give information as to how he got to where he is," Carol A. Turkoc said. "His talk shows Boston as being a community of creative people instead of something cutthroat."

Valerie H. Weiss, a student at Harvard Medical School who organized the talk as part of the Dudley Co-Op's Film and Drama program, said that Fennessy is well qualified to talk about casting, a very important aspect of filmmaking.

Weiss started the Dudley Film and Drama program last year when she recognized that graduate students needed an outlet on campus to learn about filmmaking.

Now more than 200 students and community members attend the program's events, which include many film and theater productions as well as guest speeches.

Additional information about the program can be found on the program's website at http://www.fas.harvard.edu/

~dudley/fellows/drama/drama.html.