Nina Gold is nominated for the first-ever Best Casting Oscar for Hamnet. She has been finding actors for 35 years. Nine of the films she cast have been nominated for Best Picture — The King's Speech, Les Miserables, The Imitation Game, The Theory of Everything, The Martian, 1917, The Power of the Dog, Conclave, and now Hamnet.
She cast Game of Thrones. The Crown. Star Wars: The Force Awakens — where she found Adam Driver. When Chloe Zhao needed someone to play Agnes in Hamnet, Gold already knew. She had been watching Jessie Buckley for years, casting her twice before, tracking every performance. For the twins, she ignored the obvious move of matching faces and instead cast non-siblings Olivia Lynes and Jacobi Jupe. The bond mattered more than the resemblance.
Gold helped fight for this category to exist. Now she is one of the first five people ever nominated in it. She treats the moment as a collective one — for every casting director who built a career in a discipline the Academy took 98 years to recognize.