Dev Diary #1, Our Wars Have Ended

OK, the casting process for our next show has kicked off! But what does that mean? Let Jon attempt to explain the process, the ecstasy and the agony…

Flinging out the net

Open casting on the internet is a weird and deeply chaotic experience, and I’m not sure we’ll ever get it completely right...but it’s always a fun challenge to undergo and it's always a genuine privilege to hear from so many talented, fascinating and generally awesome people.

Last week we put out our first casting calls for Our Wars Have Ended, starting with our own social media (it’s an obvious starting point to reach people and generate enthusiasm, although I do worry that we’re setting ourselves up for disaster by ensuring that we’ll be disappointing potential audience members by not accepting them for voice roles long before the show is even out).

We then placed further calls on a big casting Discord, dusted off our login to try out a couple of FB groups (Facebook appears to be almost entirely dead in 2025, which isn’t entirely surprising), and Mandy.com, which is the first time we’ve tried paying for visibility through an online actors’ network.

We picked Mandy because Jamie Stewart, who played Mason in TSV, had used it originally - we thought it might be a good chance to reach a different pool of actors, particularly older performers for some of the roles which would likely prove harder to cast. It’s been a definite mixed bag; we’ve had a few great auditions, but more than half the overall submissions have been effectively spam - actors mass-sending their CVs and voice-reels in a single click and not engaging with us beyond that. I can’t blame them in a competitive industry, but it doesn’t make our lives much easier!

This time around, we also set an unusually long audition window - six weeks. The rationale was simple: our lives are still in flux with the baby, and we need to give ourselves a long lead-up to ensure we’re fully prepped and not rushing through the process (and that we have sufficient time to seek out more actors individually for the harder-to-cast parts, if need be).

Probably, in retrospect, too long. We currently have ~400 actors who’ve auditioned for us, making up over a thousand individual role auditions, and we have a solid month to go! (We did have a newsletter very kindly feature us but share the deadline date as June, not July, which resulted in a flurry of panicked emails).

Examining the catch

Selecting the actors themselves is a laborious process, and it’s one we’ve been working at improving since the early days of TSV to try and ensure it’s efficient, conscientious and achievable for a team of two who are rarely able to work at the same time.

Muna and I have a spreadsheet set up with a traffic-light system - red, amber, green, or ‘don’t think so’, ‘listen again’ and ‘love it!!’. We catalogue everyone who auditions, along with the number of roles they’ve applied for (for OWHE we’ve had to implement DNE, or Damn Near Everything) and space for both of us to leave notes.

If a performer ends up with a disagreement in their score, e.g. one red and green or one red and one amber, the more critical party will relisten and then both of us will compare notes; either we’ll agree to bump it up or bump it down. If we’ve both voted ‘amber’, again, we’ll relisten and discuss the audition together and come to a final decision - red or green.

Discounting anyone as a red feels inherently unfair. There’s no real way of avoiding that with this kind of process. Pretty much every performance issue that gives us pause - because the actor is coming across too flat in their delivery or without variety in their pacing, because they’re reading from the script too audibly, because they’re too nervous to really show their emotional range, or they’re going too broad and cartoonish (or sometimes putting on a voice or accent that’s getting in the way of their actual acting) - all of that can be fixed or improved upon, and in a Hollywood-style live audition, we would be able to at least offer some feedback and a second opportunity to get it right.

We’ll always try and incorporate our notes into some constructive feedback for the auditioning performer, at least, although obviously we’ll try and read the room as well. If an actor has said they’re actively looking for critiques, we’ll be more forthright and detailed than we otherwise would be; if an actor is clearly experiencing nerves, we’ll keep the feedback to one short and attainable piece of positive advice.

Reely lovely people return

We also have a number of TSV actors who’ve either auditioned already or expressed interest in working with us again, which is awesome in itself and very cheering.

It does pose an interesting conundrum for us in terms of casting, though, because audiodrama tends to develop these very intense and lasting audience attachments towards individual characters - to the detriment of the actors as career professionals. You’re not going to see movie buffs complaining that they can’t watch Stellan Skarsgard in anything else because they associate him so strongly with his character in Mamma Mia!, but we do regularly get listeners talking about how it’s a “jumpscare” or wildly distracting to have Johnny Sims from The Magnus Archives or Harlan from Malevolent showing up as actors in season 2 of The Silt Verses. 

So the question for us becomes - how do we work for a second time with actors who we love, without causing that sense of distraction? Where can we find the roles for them that feel like a fresh showcase of their talents, without their performance being viewed as effectively a novelty cameo that undermines the overall fiction? It's a knotty one.

Heading for international waters

We’ve always wanted to cast more actors who have a broader spectrum of accents than just US or UK (or Canada), and reaching a sufficiently large pool of international performers to find the right people continues to be a challenge. (We do at least now get a decent number of Irish actors auditioning with us, which we have to entirely credit Méabh de Brún for. We’ve also had a few Australian and German or Austrian actors thus far, which is very specific but very nice!)

Realistically I think we’re going to have to do some targeted pushes before auditions close to try and build up a bank of strong possibilities.

Difficult though international casting has been for us, I find it incredibly valuable as a learning experience. You find yourself navigating your own prejudices and assumptions (hey, this actor naturally has a lot of nasalisation in their delivery, simply because that’s how their native language works. Is that an objective problem for their performance in English, or is it just not something I’m personally used to?), the audience itself (I remember The White Vault caught a lot of ungenerous online flak for some of their international cast members; the stronger accents, certain vocal US/UK audience members complained, were offputting and too hard to understand. To what extent do you have to reckon with those complaints, and to what extent can you shrug your shoulders and ignore them?) and in some cases the global gig economy (a lot of the most talented international actors we’ve heard from have built their careers with accents that are convincingly and generically American, which is the exact opposite of what we need, but you can hardly blame them for that!).

Anyway, we hope to persevere and ultimately do better on this front. Watch this space and fingers crossed.

Finding our catch of the day

By the time we hit the audition deadline, the aim is to have a very solid group of greens for every part and likely some personal favourites for us to fight over; we’ll then begin the extremely hard work of finalising the roles.

This is where things will definitely get unfair, because amongst other things we’ll be mapping out vocal difference across the cast - which of our favourite performers, to our ear, sound too similar in accent, pacing, delivery and pitch to one another? How can we best ensure that we have an awesome cast, diverse in all the exciting ways we want it to be, and also recognisably distinct from character to character and scene to scene? Who do we think will play off one another best?

Again, there’s a lot to navigate here and a certain amount of guesswork, because vocal difference is subjective and heavily affected by the audience member’s background, and if we tried to accommodate every listener who says they get confused because they can’t tell Actor A apart from Actor B…we would not have a show.

In theory, this stage would be made easier by us having far stricter requirements for each role from the outset (“character X must be baritone with a Midlands accent”) - but in my experience, that ends up netting you a lot of actors who are forcing unconvincing impressions to try and meet the brief, rather than interpreting the character in a way that comes naturally to their voice and skillset and which might catch us happily by surprise. 

...and in the meantime

In the meantime, I’ll be prepping a welcome pack for our actors (parts of which I’ll probably share here, since a lot of it will be worldbuilding info, visual and tonal points of reference, etc). We’ll aim to begin introductory chats with our chosen cast through the second half of August, and begin recording in September.

We're also looking for a musical director to help us with our grandiose plans for the soundtrack and we'll be reaching out to a few people about that...and I'll begin assembling a sound library for our use.

All being well, we’ll hopefully be in a position to begin launching the first season by the end of the year!

Whew. Argh. Damn.