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Casting Director Mark Bennett on Director Macon Blair, Casting ‘The Toxic Avenger’ Reboot


November 1, 2023

The thing about Mark Bennett is that he doesn’t wait to be asked questions. He’s innately curious. Sure, most casting directors are curious, but Bennett comes out firing. Before you realize it, a whole conversation can happen.

Bennett has used that curiosity, and more than a little charm, to build a thriving casting career that has included Oscar winners (The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty, Monster’s Ball), prestigious Indies (Junebug, 20th Century Women), revered horror flicks (It Follows, Infinity Pool), and cult classics (Under the Silver Lake). Now, he’s helped bring Macon Blair’s highly anticipated remake of the prototypical cult classic The Toxic Avenger to the big screen. The film premiered September 21st at Fantastic Fest to glowing reviews. He spoke with us from his home in Los Angeles.

How did you get into casting?

I went to film school because I loved movies since I was a kid, and that was the only thing I could imagine myself doing. But when I was finishing, I realized I didn’t know what I was going to do for a living. I didn’t feel like I was really on an obvious director or producer track, but I also hadn’t specialized in any more technical discipline, like editing or camera work.

One day, a friend asked if I wanted to help work some open casting calls for an indie feature. It got me thinking about casting as a profession. I had never really thought about it before and never heard it discussed very much. So, I took what was intended to be just a summer internship at an office called Hopkins, Smith and Barden, which was at the time one of the preeminent New York casting offices and that turned into my first casting assistant job. With just a few pauses every so often along the way, that’s really what I’ve done for my profession ever since.

That comes up a lot, people not thinking of casting as a career and sort of ending up in it.

I think the profession hasn’t had a tremendous amount of visibility compared to other department heads until fairly recently. I think a lot of the general public doesn’t actually know what the job involves. Certainly, when I was going to film school, we heard about every department in the filmmaking process, but nobody ever discussed casting and we never had a casting person come and talk to us.

When we were making student films we were encouraged to hire our higher-ups, our friends and our roommates and not have a casting process. For me, having studied film production, moving into casting was considered kind of unusual at the time, but it was actually very logical. It just took me working on that open call to actually see it in action.

One of the things I really appreciate about your career that I don’t see from a lot of other casting directors is how much horror you’ve done. Do you seek it out?

I don’t seek it out, but I don’t avoid it either. I enjoy the horror genre as much as I enjoy any other genre. I always ask the same questions when I’m sent a piece of material. Would I want to watch this? Do I respond to this director’s point of view? Do I think there would be something I could bring to this through the casting? I definitely tend to respond well to directors who have a strong point of view.

For directors like that, one of the only ways they can seem to get their projects financed is if they have what is termed a genre element, and then you can use that as kind of a Trojan horse to bring in your thematic concerns or try out some of the aesthetic experiments you might want. I would never want to work exclusively on horror movies, but I’m obviously open to it.

I’m curious about the Toxic Avenger remake. You worked with director Macon Blair on his first movie, I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore. Was that why you came on board?

Well, first off, I think if you had told the 21-year-old me in 1996 that in 2023 I’d be talking about having cast a reboot of the Toxic Avenger franchise, I would have assumed you had made some kind of mistake (laughs).

Macon is a very smart, thoughtful and articulate person, but he also genuinely loves stuff like the original Toxic Avenger. So I think the goal of his take was to be thoughtful and interesting, but at the same time to deliver everything that you expect from a remake of The Toxic Avenger. It was exciting to work on something that stretches some different muscles. Very often I work on projects that aren’t comedic, that are kind of dark and have a tone of gritty realism. So to be asked to do a reboot of The Toxic Avenger was kind of exciting for me.

What piece of advice or wisdom would would you share with an actor coming to audition for you?

Two things. The first is the suggestion of a real, three-dimensional person with all their quirks and specificities. This sounds obvious, but what stands out is when you really feel like you’re seeing a real person on the screen. Often in a casting scenario that is most easily achieved by just bringing your own actual personality to it.

The second thing is that we’re looking for a degree of commitment that we feel mirrors our own. Communicate your enthusiasm through your degree of preparedness. You can approach it from several different angles and can endlessly unpack it, but I think those are the fundamental answers that I have.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

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