Alessi Hartigan Casting is in expansion mode. The company, which has 30 U.S.-based employees and an especially strong presence in Hawaii, New Mexico and Los Angeles, is kicking off 2025 with a move into London.

The city will be its main base of European operations as it works on projects — internal parlance is to refer to movies and TV shows alike as “shows” — in countries like Spain, France, Bulgaria, and Ireland. 

Expanding has always been central to the company’s mission. Founders Sande Alessi and Shayne Hartigan thrive on welcoming new people into the business of being background players, especially if they are historically underrepresented on camera. 

Many recent productions have pulled them toward London, but one of the biggest was Robert Zemeckis’ Tom Hanks-Robin Wright drama Here, which asked Alessi Hartigan to find Native American background actors in New Mexico who were willing to travel to the United Kingdom.

Other clients include Lucasfilm. They hope to soon have 75,000 people in their London database. 

The Background on Alessi Hartigan Casting

Hartigan grew up in the industry — his parents worked in practical special effects and he was a child actor. As a teenager living in Hawaii, he got an internship and then a job on CBS’s Hawaii Five-O before leaving for college at New York University.

At NYU, he realized casting was his true calling.

“I’ve been very lucky to have a lot of opportunities, and I was going to school with all these people who never really had those opportunities, and I was kind of reflecting on that, and saw that as a casting director, I would have that opportunity to reach these communities that have never been given a chance,” he says. 

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“We can put upwards of 100,000 people on set a year, and we get a lot of emails from people who say, ‘This was my life dream.’ Especially doing shows like the Oppenheimers and Barbies of the world, or Moana.”

Alessi, meanwhile, made her way into the industry after starting out in music. She was a successful background player herself — turn on Seinfeld, and there’s a good chance you’ll catch her as a waitress — but she also saw background acting as a way to learn how sets worked.

“I would be the type who would show up and say to the director of photography, ‘How’d you get this job? How much money do you make? Who’s in your department?’” she laughs.

She noticed that many departments, at the time, were male-dominated — but that she could make a big impact in casting. She soon worked on films including Minority Report, The Truman Show, Fight Club, Catch Me If You Can, Argo, The Social Network, and the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise.

She and Hartigan started their company after hitting it off on a Hawaiian casting call for 2017’s Kong: Skull Island. They pride themselves on trying to improve the treatment of background players everywhere they go.

“I know what it’s like to sit in holding, and not have a heater or water,” Alessi notes. So the pair make sure their background players are fed, paid and treated well.

They note that there are, of course, already plenty of casting companies in London. But they plan to draw from a bigger pool of talent — by creating it.

“Whenever we’re putting casting notices out, it’s not for the people whose attention we have already. It’s for those people and their family and their friends who have never done this before,” says Alessi. “We want to get them off the couch.”

Main image: Shayne Hartigan and Sande Alessi. Courtesy of Alessi Hartigan Casting.