Elas por Elas: casting producer explains how the young version of the protagonists was cast | They for Them

Anyone who believes that Elas por Elas features seven leading actresses is mistaken. The number of main characters is correct, but the number of names in each role is a little higher. For accuracy, it doubles: there are 14 artists in front of the text. From the first scene, back on September 25th, at the beginning of it all, the plot also presented the group of friends in their youth, through flashbacks. And one person, in particular, dedicated even more attention to the meticulous process of casting a soap opera.

Aware of the responsibility of the job, the casting producer Daniel Pereira He says he went into his “internal HD”, stocked with several young names from the seasons he worked on the extinct teen soap opera Malhação. There are some criteria to be met and values ​​to follow, because, as she explains, there is importance in reproducing diversity, mainly due to the influence exerted by soap operas.

“I think we are very responsible for bringing this diversity, and we bring proposals for that”, says Dani. “It’s a very collective work, I don’t work alone. It’s a team.”

“We are portraying a soap opera 40 years after (it was originally made)”, she recalls, contextualizing the fact that the project is a reinterpretation of the plot by Cassiano Gabus Mendes, which featured seven white actresses. “For God’s sake, it couldn’t be the same four decades ago. And we are grateful for that!”

“In each one of them (from the young cast), we noticed the similarity in the interpretation. And there is a maturity to this young cast that is impressive. Maturity and naturalness”, highlights the producer.

For gshowshe detailed part of the process; check it out below!

“Because Débora had a specific face, at first, I wanted to take the character to a place in a casting that had more to do with the role and not so much with the physiognomy. (…) Kíria was mainly due to the test she did and what she presented about the character. And it ended up working out very well in both cases (role affinity and physiognomy), right? Because she is well on par with Deborah in terms of interpretation.”

“Shi was an interesting casting case. I didn’t have it in my memory bank. The suggestion came through Filipe Barbosa, one of our directors, with whom she had already worked. We worked on a monologue that the authors gave me for testing, but which only had the characters in the present. I told Shi that I couldn’t write the character for her and I didn’t even have enough scenes to give. (…) I proposed that she build a drama about who would be the Renée of the past, from the present. In this case, I already had the similarity (with Maria Clara Spinelli). What made sense was to try to bring the two (phases of the character) closer together. When I presented her test, it was unanimous. And maybe we didn’t even need the test to find out, because the first image that Shi created virtually was already the Renée we wanted.”

“Mari had already auditioned with me for the role of Thalita Carauta’s daughter in Todas as Flores. Obviously, this already created a reference for me. She even did the first in-person test without a character, as we didn’t yet have the definition of the seven protagonists. And this was very nice to notice, because, when we cast Thalita as Adriana, we saw that in Mari’s test she had similarities with the character. We didn’t have to fit in because of similarity.”

“Fernanda had already played the same character as Isabel Teixeira, in a flashback of Amor de Mãe. So, it was also already on my radar. We even thought of her for the role of Carol. Fernanda had a funny thing. In the test, she did not present a construction of Helena, she did not yet know the role. But she has a (character) construction very similar to Isabel’s. I understood that she had a connection with Isabel. Mainly, because of my theater training.”

“When I called Jade to audition, I was thinking about Mônica Iozzi (originally cast as Natália). I watched Jade in a Porta dos Fundos video and, when I saw it, Mônica came to mind. Her test was generic, we didn’t want to force anything, so she would do it naturally. When she arrived, the director asked for an adaptation and she, impressively, memorized in five minutes a complex monologue by Natália, a character with many emotional issues. When the actress changed, Jade was already Natália. Maybe she doesn’t have that much resemblance (to Mariana Santos), but with her talent, I think the public will buy it.”

“Liza was a very interesting fit. She did a beautiful Taís test. She was one of the actresses who was tested for Isis, which was the generic text that I had to pass (during the casting test battery period). With Isis’s monologue, she delivered. It has a romantic tone that reaches humor… It’s drama! Which is the heart of the novel.”

“I had another actress for the role, but she was reassigned to another project. Then it turns out that fate helped us. I already knew Sabrina’s history. I auditioned three actresses. In hers, it was unanimous. It happened virtually and was a text adapted for Carol, more assertive to the character, since we were on a deadline. Now, seeing it on the air, in a certain way, she is the one who needed the least advice, in terms of physiognomy with Karine Teles. But as she is a great actress, a studious and diverse girl, as she also sings, dances and is a voice actor, she gained the character in a (unique) way.