A Casting Vet on Hollywood’s Infuriating Embrace of Influencers and the Challenges of Starting Over
“We’ve decided to go in a different direction.”
It was a line Tess Sanchez uttered often in her job as a high-powered casting director, first at the WB and later at Fox; then, in the fall of 2020, that same phrase was used on her as her boss revealed the network was doing away with her position, ending a 20-year career over Zoom. Sanchez detailed all of it in her recently published collection of essays, appropriately titled We’re Going in a Different Direction, which she discussed with moderator Ali Wentworth, herself an author as well as an actress, producer, podcaster and comedian, at East Hampton’s Hedges Inn in early July.
The lively talk kicked off a new, weekly conversation series that the inn — now under the stewardship of Andrew and Sarah Wetenhall, known for revitalizing The Colony Hotel in Palm Beach — is billing as “intimate gatherings featuring a curated selection of guests and luminaries for engaging discussions, inspiring demonstrations, and community-driven activations.” On this evening, guests from the worlds of entertainment, literature, fashion and New York society convened in the hotel garden, where they sipped rosé and occasionally craned their necks to catch a glimpse of Gwyneth Paltrow and husband Brad Falchuk dining on the patio above.
Once it became clear that Sanchez wasn’t going to share salacious stories from the casting trenches — something she also declines to do in the book — Wentworth refocused the conversation, lobbing thoughtful questions about Sanchez’s professional rise and fall, the state of Hollywood broadly and casting specifically, and her relationship with her husband, New Girl and The Neighborhood star Max Greenfield. (Though Greenfield was not in attendance as he’s currently shooting an Adam Sandler comedy in nearby New Jersey, he did get plenty of airtime.)
As Sanchez details in the book, she first met Greenfield at an L.A. bar in the early aughts, back when he was still a hard partying, aspiring actor and she a young casting exec. And though their earliest days were arguably rom-com worthy, he’d ultimately spiral into addiction, entering rehab during a brief hiatus in their now decades-long relationship. Sanchez suggests she saw no value in keeping the latter a secret, particularly given her husband’s success. Greenfield has been sober since 2006. What’s more, her husband’s sobriety journey can serve as “a cautionary tale,” particularly for their two children.
Greenfield had given his wife his blessing, too — though she jokes he wasn’t handed a manuscript to pore over until it was too late in the process to make significant changes. To her relief, he read it and had none to offer. He even agreed to write the introduction, introducing himself to readers as “Mr. Tess Sanchez.” His manager, Jason Weinberg, had been enlisted as a reader considerably earlier in the process. In fact, Sanchez credits him with the all-important, initial assurance that she had a book on her hands. Weinberg, who’d attended the Superman premiere with client David Corenswet in L.A. the evening before, was now in attendance at The Hedges where he was shouted out more than once.
While Sanchez’s stories weave in plenty about her family and friends, the book’s inciting event is that “humiliating” zoom call with her former boss that left her utterly blindsided. She’d expected a standard check-in, but in a matter of minutes, she’d been fired from a career that had defined her for two decades. Who was she without this job, she wondered often. After all, she’d played a key role in the casting of such shows as Brooklyn Nine-Nine and The Mindy Project. At Fox, her professional home of more than a decade, she’d become the longest-tenured senior programming executive and the only woman of color in a senior creative executive position.
In the five years since, Sanchez has not taken another job, a subject Wentworth was eager to explore. Had she considered a gig at another studio, she asked. It wasn’t so simple, explained Sanchez. Her job was, in her estimation, a relic of a different time — the business no longer relies on broadcast network casting directors to discover talent through global searches and talent holding deals. Like Wentworth, she lamented the rise of influencers as TV stars, noting in no uncertain terms that one doesn’t equate to the other. Nevertheless, actors are increasingly being asked to provide their social media followers with their headshots, as though a few hundred thousand TikTok followers was as valuable as NYU or Yale Drama School training.
Of course, that kind of misguided thinking was not altogether new. In fact, back in 2013, Wentworth says she lost a gig as a co-host at The View to Jenny McCarthy primarily because the former Singled Out host had a bigger following. Never mind that it wasn’t the type that would tune in to The View. When the McCarthy experiment failed, they came back to Wentworth, but by then she was already committed elsewhere. It was one of several juicy reveals from Wentworth, who also shared how an agent once told her that the folks behind a project she was auditioning for wanted “an eight,” and she “was a six.” “Did you fire that agent?” asked a visibly horrified Sanchez. “Well, I stopped sleeping with him,” Wentworth quipped in return.
When the discussion opened to questions from the audience, a woman asked if Sanchez had heard from her ex-boss since the book came out. It’s worth noting that he is never named; rather, he’s described in the book as a “president of a major television studio/network/streamer” and “a Joseph Gordon Levitt-type.” (Sanchez casts everyone she references, including herself: “think Jennifer Lopez.”) Yes was her answer. In fact, she’d been told his wife had ordered a signed a copy to give him for Father’s Day, which Sanchez could only assume was some of twisted joke. But before heading east for the summer, she bit the bullet and says she texted him, eager to see if he had read it. He had. He even told her it was well written.
Still, the most poignant moments in the evening’s conversation were not about her firing or even her rocky road to marital bliss; instead, they centered on the heartache of watching parents age, something both women and likely many more in the audience have experienced. As she does in the book, Sanchez spoke adoringly of her dad, her mentor and biggest cheerleader who passed away a year and a half before the book was published. He’d been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s only a week or so before her firing, and him not being well enough to guide her through this chapter, as he had through every other chapter, left her heartbroken all over again.
Shortly after he died, Sanchez opened a file folder where every email that she’d ever written him had been printed and catalogued, and reading through them became the contents of her late addition, final chapter to her debut book. Occasionally they included his replies as well, including one, which read: “I just read this email and I love your descriptions. I hope you keep writing; maybe you should look into taking a writing class. Maybe a second career path awaits.”
