ANGELA PERI

SHOW ME YOUR TEETH and other advice from Boston’s own ANGELA PERI

Having walked through the doors of Boston Casting for auditions at both the old location on Boylston and the newer one at 129 Braintree Street, I can tell you first hand, there is something different about its director Angela Peri in her way of handling actors for what has to be the most humbling (did I say intimidating) part of the actor’s job, that would be casting. She is so warm and welcoming you almost forget you are auditioning. It is fun to visit Boston Casting because you don’t feel like you are going to be “cast” off even if you don’t get or even come close to getting the job. Angela, after all was an actress herself, with dreams of being an Italian film star like her favorite, Anna Magnani, the illegitimate child of Marina Magnani and an unknown father, often said to be from Alexandria, Egypt, but whom Anna herself claimed was from the Calabria region of Italy (although she never knew his name). So she and Anna understand rejection. Oh, Angela has her advice on what actors need to do. She knows who can do the job and who can’t but to her there’s more at stake than the job. This is her life, you see, so being nice is important.

Angela started Boston Casting, Inc. twelve years ago. After acting adventures in Italy, a casting job for CINEMA PARADISO, a stint as a stand-up comic, and working for a top-casting agency in Boston, Angela decided that she wanted to start her own business. Her first impulse was to start a restaurant but Angela settled with a casting agency because she figured it did not require a big overhead. A natural “people person” and a hard worker, Angela Peri jumped right in!

SALLY: How did you develop those relationships? Did you have to go around to advertising agencies?

ANGELA: The funniest thing is when I opened this business I was sick of being an actress and I realized that I put myself in the position of doing the same thing, but, instead of running around with my photo I run around with the Boston Casting promo instead…We, as Casting Directors, have to take our stuff around just like the actors and promote ourselves.

ANGELA: I wouldn’t say “niche”. I built the business on honesty and integrity and that’s how I live my life and that’s how I built this business. And I think that “stick-to-it-ness” has been my staying power…. People know I’m honest and that I deliver a good package and I give them a good price and I think that that’s a lot of the game in business.

ANGELA: Yeah, they shop around...they call all the casting directors and get prices. But luckily we have a situation here in this city where we have ‘fair competitiveness’, an open competitiveness where we are all around the same price.

ANGELA: Sometimes. But I like to feel we are at a point in the business where it comes to us. I don’t have to chase it like I used to. We’re busy.

SALLY: Now, since we don’t have agents in this area, are casting agents here kind of acting like they are our “agents”?

ANGELA: No, that’s not true at all. I don’t represent actors at all. I don’t pretend to. I don’t guide anyone. I represent the producer. My job is to give producers a finished product of what he is going to be able to use in his shoot. Choices. Good choices for him. They can go to my website at www.bostoncasting.com. It breaks down the casting director vs. agent issue. It’s always been an issue especially here in Boston because we don’t have agents. People are really confused by that. They (actors) constantly come to my office and ask ‘how much does it cost to be with Boston Casting?’ We get that over and over and we say, ‘It costs you nothing’-and they almost don’t believe me. They think, ‘what’s the catch?’ There is no catch. You just have to send us your photo (headshot/resume) and then you go into the file and if something comes up that we think you are right for, we’ll give you a call.

ANGELA: No, not on-line. That includes real people, kids, ethnic and I’d say, out of that, there are about 700 union actors.

ANGELA: Yes, we are open Saturday for classes. And we usually come in and work to keep up with the filing!

SALLY: Do you have favorite actors that you keep calling back because you know their work, and you know it’s consistent so it makes the job easier?

A|NGELA: Yes, there is a core of actors who can do absolutely anything. Jerry Kissel is one of them. I love having him around because he’s entertaining. I can throw any script at him at any moment and he can handle it and shine with it. But every single session I try to bring in at least five new people so then I’m always seeing the new people in town or somebody that I haven’t seen in awhile-bring them back because I would never keep it to just the same people because that’s not fair. (To illustrate her loyalty, even after death, Angela told me at an earlier meeting, that she “even keeps a ‘deceased file’ because she ‘just cannot bear to throw their headshots out’!)

SALLY: For an actor to know is there too much attention vs. too little attention from an actor? I mean do you find that it pays off if actors are sending you the new resume and headshot consistently? Does that make you pay any more attention to them?

ANGELA: This is a funny story… I had one actress who sent a small pizza box with 200 pictures of herself. I had met her, she was an actress out of Connecticut, so I said, ‘you know, Connecticut is not that far. If I can use you…send me a couple of pictures’. So she sent me 200 pictures of herself, which was annoying. So I called her up and asked her, ‘what do you expect me to do? I’m not going to spend the postage to mail them back to you so either you come back and pick them up or I’m going to trash them because I only really need 4-6 pictures at any one time in this office.’ She was so embarrassed. She called me up. She just got overexcited.

There are certain producers that can’t afford casting so we do “picture pulls” so I love being able to give them a hard copy rather than a photo copy so I like having 6 copies of everybody in this office…And it is time consuming and tedious to have the interns go through… We had to recently go through everybody in the files and pull out the pictures from 1993, the pictures that were 10 years old.

ANGELA: I’ve always liked it ľ. Even in the 80’s I liked it ľ because I feel like it’s just “body language”. It gives me more. It shows me. Because I never know what I’ll get when the head comes in. And you got to smile in your picture, too. I don’t know why people think they shouldn’t smile because it makes them look more dramatic. It’s all baloney! You need nice teeth in this business! If you don’t have nice teeth, get them fixed before you start because you are wasting everybody’s time. I won’t bring in someone who sends me a picture and they are not smiling until I meet them because I’ve had that mistake of sending this guy that didn’t smile, bringing him in and sure enough as soon as he opens his mouth his teeth were all crooked. They were a mess! No matter how good of a read he was he wasn’t going to work. He wasn’t going to be likeable and appealing on tape. So since then anyone who doesn’t smile they are shooting themselves in the foot with me because I have to wait ‘till I can meet you beforehand, which is probably never, in order for you to get in here. So you gotta show me your teeth in your headshot. Even in Polaroid’s I make people smile. Because if you have nice teeth it’s an asset. Show them off!

SALLY: So, okay, nice teeth. What about having your eyes done? And the face lifted and all of that?

SALLY: But in general, do you think there is any shift in the business that way?

ANGELA: No, not in Boston. Boston is a character town. We want you the way you are.

To learn more about Boston Casting, Inc., check out their web site at www.bostoncasting.com.

Sally Fay Cottinghan worked with the ABC/Hearst production team that launched A&E in NYC. She has acted in major motion pictures, independent films and television. She has written, produced and directed 2 shorts, PATTY’S FANTASY and WATERTALK, and is currently working on her third film.