Get to Know the Casting Director: Rita Manyette

Talk to enough casting directors, and certain commonalities start to arise. Strong organizational skills, for instance. A love of actors. Many of them, in fact, used to be actors, but ended up on the casting side for one reason or another. There are very few, however, who came from acting, went into casting, but continued acting as well. Rita Manyette is one of those select few. The head of Martini Shot Casting in Jacksonville, Florida, Manyette doesn’t just work in film, TV, and commercials, though she does plenty of those. She also does something else that is rare among anyone in the film industry: for years, she worked with the government to train soldiers on how to deal with people in foreign lands. Literally life and death stuff, and it’s only part of her fascinating life story. She spoke with us from her parents’ home in Alabama, where she was waiting out Hurricane Milton.

I’ve always just wanted to be an actor, and never wanted really to be on this side of the table, at least at first. I had a theater degree and was a theater snob. My son was born with a heart defect, so his first two years of life, we had a lot of home nursing, and those nurses fell in love with him and called the local news saying, you gotta meet this kid. So they sent the American Heart Association person to give me some talking points for the interview, not knowing that I’m trained. So I gave a great interview, and after that, the American Heart Association was like, we have a mom that can speak! We just started raising money for [the] American Heart Association and doing commercials for them. Once my son was through most of his major surgeries as a baby, to a point where he could be watched by someone else, I started auditioning.

I did a film for some friends of mine in school, and because I had put my name out there and done the social thing, they asked if I would cast it. And I’m like, “Oh, it’s a horror film. Okay, how many zombies are we talking about on what day?” That kind of thing. That got picked up by The Weinstein Company, and then everybody started calling me for their projects. Once that happened, I realized, this is what I’m supposed to do. So I started Martini Shot Casting, and really haven’t looked back.

I just can’t give up that part of my life or my soul. It really is my calling, and has been since childhood. I definitely do more casting, but I love auditioning. I still love the process of all of it.

I’m an organizational person, I know what a production needs, and I’m so production-oriented when it comes to those kind of jobs. I love that I had some hand in the success of a production. I get bored very easily, and you put me in a cubicle job, I am not going to be happy. This gives me a new challenge, a different challenge, every single time I’m doing something, and it’s never felt boring. I’ve heard it said that a bad day on set is better than a good day in an office.

Right! But also, though, it has parlayed into other opportunities. I’ve done a lot of training for the government, hiring people to play COBs, which is a civilian on the battlefield. Big productions all over the country, and I love that too. It still used my skills, but I was able to be a part of a really important training for people that were going over in theater. Not stage theater, in theater in the country where they are fighting.

It’s called XCTC rotations. This was for the National Guard. We would train anywhere from 30,000 to 60,000 troops in a three to six-week period. I’ve done this in Wyoming, Minnesota, Alabama, Florida. It’s hiring these folks to basically play villagers. In those villages, they are not allowed to speak English. We kind of teach them a few Arabic phrases, but most of the time it just needs to be gibberish to give the troops that are coming through the training of having to figure it out, find the insurgent. It’s unbelievable what they do to get these guys ready. Now, luckily, we are not in Iraq or Afghanistan anymore, so those rotations are no longer out there. I did most of these in 2010, 2011, ’12, and then since then, I’ve done other work for government projects where I’ve been a producer and executive producer.

Like I said, I love being part of the project. I love knowing that my skill set and my work ethic in general is going to something useful, something hopefully meaningful, that has saved some lives.

I loved when the incentives were in place. I did a lot more work on bigger projects. Working with HBO and Cinemax and different companies and entities that are now in Atlanta or Louisiana, New Mexico, even Tennessee. I’m going to be working with a friend of mine producing a project in Oklahoma. It’s going to be shot for Florida, but in Oklahoma because the incentives are just better, and that’s heartbreaking. We get a lot of Americans for Prosperity that lobby to make sure that the film industry is tied to the tourism industry, though we should be a separate entity. They fight against anything that could help this industry build in Florida. There’s still people that will shoot in Florida, commercials and stuff without incentives, or with few incentives, especially golf commercials. Being in Jacksonville, that’s one of my bread and butters. But yeah, it’s definitely a different animal now than it was when we had incentives that brought people to us.

Not following the directions. Just not even reading it. I see so many good actors that just simply missed one request. They skip over it. They’re so used to their process and maybe even somebody else’s, that they’re not reading a lot of the directions. That’s one of the main things I see.

I need to see you in that audition. You may be building a character, but you have to find where that character would be if you had been born like that person. How would you approach this situation if your life was different? Sometimes I see a character put on like a coat, but not being worn, you know? Not being inside them. I love when a person really gets the character. Even the smallest nuances can be shown if you find where you would be if you were like that person.

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