Meredith Tucker didn’t have her sights set on Hollywood while working at West Coast Video in Brandywine Hundred’s Branmar Plaza the summer after graduating from Brandywine High School.
When customers asked for a good film, she invariably would end her recommendation by telling them what other films the actors and actresses were in.
“The cast was always what I would primarily think about,” she says. “It always stuck in my mind.”
Fast-forward to today and the Brandywine Hundred native-turned-Brooklynite is now nominated for her 11th Emmy Award as an in-demand casting director.
She’s already won four after getting her big TV casting break on “The Sopranos” in 2000. In the past 20 years, she has won a winged statuette in Outstanding Casting for “Boardwalk Empire,” “Veep,” “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” and, most recently, “The White Lotus.”
This year’s nomination is once again for “The White Lotus,” but this time she can share the night with a fellow nominated Delawarean she cast for the same show: Aubrey Plaza.
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Even before Plaza joined “The White Lotus” cast for the most recent season of the Mike White-created black comedy anthology, Tucker had met the actress. And, no, it had nothing to do with their First State roots.
Both just happened to be guests about eight years ago at the wedding of a mutual friend, director Miguel Arteta, and the two talked about Delaware a bit. (While most of Tucker’s immediate family has moved away from the area, she still visits occasionally, including a trip earlier this month for a friend’s birthday.)
Their worlds collided again when White (“School of Rock,” “Enlightened”) wrote the role of the intense Harper Spiller for the second season of “The White Lotus,” which aired this winter on HBO and earned 23 Emmy nominations, including Plaza’s first.
White had Plaza in mind for the character when he wrote it, so Tucker’s job of casting her wasn’t too complicated. There was no audition and Tucker just needed to coordinate and make sure Plaza’s schedule was clear for the shoot in Sicily, Italy.
“He knew Aubrey’s work well enough,” she says. “He knows what he’s getting.”
Without the usual audition process and filming taking place in Europe, it wasn’t until the show’s premiere that Tucker had the opportunity to reintroduce herself to Plaza, who she says shined in the role.
“That’s what’s so great about [White’s] writing, she really was able to show some other colors and a different side to what she usually plays. She just did a terrific job,” Tucker says.
Could the pair of Delawareans share a golden moment at the 75th Emmy Awards on Sept. 18 at the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles? It’s possible, but given the ongoing SAG-AFTRA (Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists) strike, that moment may be postponed.
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From Brandywine High School to casting feature films
Tucker’s road to Hollywood (and “The White Lotus”) can be traced back to her high school years on Foulk Road, where she acted in school productions and later at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, where she studied history and acted on the side.
“I was never very good. I just did it for fun. I never thought I would be an actor,” she says.
In fact, it was at Wesleyan where she first spotted classmate and now-longtime friend White. Even back then, she knew he was special.
“He was far and above the most talented and just the funniest. He was head and shoulders above with his talent and magnetism,” says Tucker, who helped cast the 2000 White-written breakthrough film, “Chuck & Buck,” which he also starred in.
“And it wasn’t just me who saw it. Everyone noticed that he was just much more,” she adds. “He is truly one of the most generous, loving, wonderful people out there. He’s just an amazing person.”
It was several years before that when Tucker dipped her toe into the non-acting side of show business as a college intern for New York Theatre Workshop, where she read plays and worked backstage before helping with casting, although it was mostly clerical work.
But then she got her first paid casting jobs with a string of accomplished casting directors with impressive credits, first with John Lyons (“The Big Lebowski,” “Fargo,” “Cocktail”) and then Ellen Chenoweth (“Terms of Endearment,” “A Bronx Tale,” “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”). She then worked with Howard Feuer (“Moonstruck,” “The Silence of the Lambs,” “Groundhog Day,” “Philadelphia”) for nearly seven years.
During those early years, Tucker helped cast everything from “The Truman Show” and “Six Degrees of Separation” to “The Good Girl” and Gus Van Sant’s near shot-for-shot remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho.”
Making the leap from film to TV with ‘The Sopranos’
With a lot of her work in Los Angeles, a place that never really grew on her, she decided to move back east and took a job with Walken/Jaffe, led by casting duo Georgianne Walken and Sheila Jaffe. Her first job for them was as casting associate for the third season of “The Sopranos,” already a runaway smash hit.
It was her first foray into television casting.
“Quite an introduction,” jokes Tucker, who also went on to co-cast as casting director on the first two seasons of “Entourage,” earning a pair of Emmy nominations.
She remembers what it was like to be in the middle of “The Sopranos” frenzy, pointing to one day when they decided to expand their search for potential cast members and held an open audition in the summer of 2000 at Harrison High School, just outside of Newark, New Jersey.
The place was mobbed with more than 10,000 people showing up, causing such a traffic jam on the New Jersey Turnpike that the exits to Harrison had to be closed. The casting call was shut down after less than an hour.
Even so, they auditioned more than 100 people and got a handful of roles filled from it, including the character Ginny Sacrimoni, wife of mobster John “Johnny Sack” Sacrimoni, played by the late Denise Borino-Quinn.
Tucker eventually struck out on her own and now leads her own Meredith Tucker Casting company, based in Manhattan.
She has since cast hits “Boardwalk Empire,” “Veep” and “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” earning Emmys for all three. She also cast White’s HBO comedy/drama “Enlightened” starring Laura Dern, the Showtime crime series “Ray Donovan” and Netflix sitcom “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.”
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In recent years, she has stayed busy not only with “The White Lotus,” but also casting Sylvester Stallone’s first leading role in a scripted television series (“Tulsa King”), Forest Whitaker’s “Godfather of Harlem” and the May release of the HBO satirical miniseries “White House Plumbers” co-starring Woody Harrelson and Justin Theroux.
“I’ve been lucky to work very consistently,” she says.
So humble, her mom has her Emmys
With both writers and actors on strike bringing television and film work to a screeching halt, Tucker’s newest projects are on pause. Even so, she’s not stopping.
She’s working on a low-budget indie film named “Griffin in Summer” by writer/director Nicholas Colia, which is outside of the major studio system and has an interim agreement with the unions to continue production.
For the time, she’s back working on small-scale projects, a bit of a full-circle moment for someone who still marvels at how far she has come from those days working the counter at West Coast Video.
“I didn’t foresee going into the entertainment industry. I thought I’d probably be a lawyer,” Tucker says. “It’s still a bit shocking to this day to have things turn out this well career-wise. I’m humbled and thrilled ― there’s a lot of luck involved.”
How humble is she? She doesn’t even keep her Emmy statues in her home.
She gave them all to her mother to keep: “I’d be embarrassed to have them out, to be honest.”
Have a story idea? Contact Ryan Cormier of Delaware Online/The News Journal at rcormier@delawareonline.com or (302) 324-2863. Follow him on Facebook (@ryancormier) and Twitter (@ryancormier).
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