One of the marquee actors in A House of Dynamite, the 2025 Netflix thriller, is best known for playing a troubled British detective. Another lead is a Swedish actor coming off a role in the two-part sci-fi epic Dune. A Pulitzer-winning playwright plays a military general and two members of the original Broadway cast of Hamilton fill other roles in the film. 

It took a creative vision and a deep understanding of acting to assemble that cast—Idris Elba, Rebecca Ferguson, Tracy Letts, Anthony Ramos and Renée Elise Goldsberry, respectively—into the united front of US military and government officials reacting to an incoming nuclear missile. 

Director Kathryn Bigelow tells this story by repeating the same 18-minute period from three perspectives—inside the White House Situation Room, US Strategic Command and, finally, the president’s limousine—as the missile is detected, tracked and nears impact. 

For this trick of storytelling to succeed, the actors had to be believable as officials grappling with an international crisis while conveying their humanity through subtle hints of emotion and vulnerability. Each vignette had to reveal something new about the characters even as they repeated the same lines in all three acts. To find the perfect actor for each role, Bigelow turned to Susanne Scheel.

Scheel (’09) had worked in casting departments since 2009, and had just wrapped one of her first projects as a casting director: the 2023 independent film Past Lives, which she cast alongside Ellen Chenoweth. She had previously worked on the shows Parenthood and Billions, the films Mad Max: Fury Road and Springsteen: Delivery Me From Nowhere, and dozens of other projects. Then the success of Past Lives—which received an Oscar nomination for best picture—vaulted her into position to take on a Netflix blockbuster like A House of Dynamite.

A People Person

Scheel looks for two things in a script: authentic dialogue and dynamic characters she’s excited to pitch to actors. Without those, she’s likely to pass on a project. Once on board, “It’s always my job to either find the director exactly what they want, or find something even more interesting, more exciting, to replace their initial idea,” she says.

It’s not a role she’d imagined when she arrived at BU. Scheel recalls struggling to determine her path in the film and television industry until Paul Schneider, an adviser and the former chair of film and television, suggested she make a list of likes and dislikes. After reading her notes, he had a suggestion. “You love working with actors, but don’t want to be a director. You love great writing and great characters but don’t want to be a writer. That’s casting,” she remembers him saying. 

COM didn’t offer those kinds of courses, so Scheel interned with a Boston casting agency and cast films for her classmates. She minored in theatre arts at BU’s College of Fine Arts to study acting. “In casting, you read opposite the actors off camera all the time,” she says. “It was fascinating to analyze and break down text.” 

Casting for a feature film breaks down into two primary stages. First, offers are made to actors for the lead roles, to get big names attached to the project. That’s followed by auditions to fill out the cast. One way Scheel prepares is simple: she binges on television shows, films and Broadway productions. “My husband calls me a walking, talking IMDb Pro page,” she says. But there’s also a more subtle side to the craft. “Great acting is just people being human on camera,” she says. “I love to people watch, to watch their mannerisms and their behaviors when they’re going through different scenarios. I find that to be just as helpful as watching really great acting.”

With most projects, Scheel’s involvement lasts three to four months and wraps up long before production is over. For A House of Dynamite, she remained on the job for nine months. “The way Kathryn works—at any point someone could be asked to do a line or two,” she says. That meant constantly scrambling to fill undefined roles. 

Complicating the process, Bigelow wanted as many of the actors as possible, even extras, to have military backgrounds. “With Kathryn, it can’t feel like a dramatic reenactment. It has to feel real and human and stripped down to the bare bones,” Scheel says. “There’s a way they stand, there’s a way they hold themselves, there’s a cadence to which they speak. She wanted a documentary-level of credibility.”

Scheel ultimately cast 113 principal actors—defined as anyone who receives individual direction. In contrast, she says, Past Lives had fewer than 30.

A Complex Puzzle

Scheel treated each of A House of Dynamite’s settings as if it was its own short film with a distinct cast. “We started with the big roles then built out from there. Who sits next to that person? Then who sits next to that person? We just started building this huge puzzle,” she says.

Idris Elba, a four-time Emmy nominee for the British detective show Luther, was one of the first actors that Scheel and Bigelow discussed, casting him as the president of the United States. Scheel suggested Rebecca Ferguson, from Dune and the Apple TV+ sci-fi show Silo, for a lead role in the Situation Room. And to anchor the US Strategic Command set, Scheel cast Tracy Letts, a veteran actor and playwright. “We just couldn’t get him out of our minds—thank goodness he didn’t say no,” she says.

Other key roles went to Renée Elise (Angelica Schuyler in the original Broadway cast of Hamilton), Anthony Ramos (John Laurens and Philip Hamilton in the same Hamilton production). 

“To me, the most breakout performance is from Malachi Beasley,” Scheel says. Beasley, a recent grad of the Yale School of Drama, had never acted in a feature film. But his agent knew what Scheel was looking for—Beasley spent six years in the military—and reached out. He was one of their first auditions and landed the role of Senior Chief Petty Officer William Davis, a key official in the White House Situation Room.

“The beauty of this cast is it’s a huge ensemble, so there’s no lead actor. Even the small parts had one or two beautiful moments—and hopefully it elevates their career,” Scheel says. 

Scheel’s own career breakthrough comes at a time when casting directors are about to receive an overdue recognition. An Oscar for casting will be awarded at the 2026 Academy Awards, on March 15, a first in the event’s 98-year history. “We always strive to do the absolute best work we can, and it’s nice to be recognized,” she says. 

Scheel admits it’s hard to watch a film she’s cast. “I don’t want to look at it and say, ‘Maybe that was a misstep,” she says. “I have to say, Past Lives and then A House of Dynamite—they’re perfect. I wouldn’t have changed anything. No one felt inauthentic, no one felt out of place.”