Casting director Kharmel Cochrane is one of the biggest names in her field in the UK, having worked on the likes of Nosferatu, Saltburn, Bob Marley: One Love and – most recently released – the highly praised military drama, Warfare.
She’s worked in casting for nearly two decades – scoring her first gig street-casting kids for her older cousin’s director pal at £50 (an upgrade from the £10 she usually made cleaning his bedroom) – and has now formed key collaborations as the go-to for filmmakers including Robert Eggers, Emerald Fennell, Alex Garland and Lena Dunham when they’re recruiting on-screen talent.
Cochrane, 39, makes for a very candid interviewee, not afraid to share her thoughts on the industry, divulge past mistakes or respond robustly to backlash over a Full English at her hotel – she’s responsible for the much-discussed casting of Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi in Fennell’s forthcoming adaptation of Wuthering Heights, of which more on that later.
For her, the role is not about being a gatekeeper against upcoming actors trying to break through, as many may assume.
‘I like to call myself a fairy job mother, I help people get the jobs. I think our role is to help curate the process,’ she tells Metro at the Sands International Film Festival of St Andrews.
Some of the most prominent parts she’s been able to bestow include Anya Taylor-Joy’s debut film role in Eggers’ The Witch, as well as Barry Keoghan in everyone’s non-family-friendly Christmas 2023 obsession, Saltburn, and Lily-Rose Depp in Nosferatu – although later that day at a Sands ‘in conversation’ event, she admits she didn’t think Depp could act and was adamantly against seeing her… only to text an apology after her audition.
In turns out there was a mortifying ‘misunderstanding’ with Taylor-Joy too before she landed her breakthrough part as Thomasin in the folk horror after ‘a massive mix-up where someone in my office had told her she got a job and she hadn’t’.
‘I wrote her a letter because she was only 19 at the time, and I thought, ‘How awful, totally my mistake’. I wrote and said, ‘Hopefully the next thing that I get you will be huge’ – and it was The Witch,’ she recalls.
Morfydd Clark was an unsuccessful auditionee for that film, but Cochrane later fought for her to star in 2019’s Saint Maud – ‘somebody who shall not be named said, basically, “On my head be it”,’ she divulges later at her Sands talk, which Cochrane took in her stride. Clark, who received accolades including a Bafta Cymru award for that performance, has since seen her career soar even higher as Galadriel in Prime Video’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.
These are just two examples of Cochrane keeping actors in the back of her mind that later came into play for other things, backing up her process of curation.
‘You don’t need to see 1000 people [for a role]. What we’ve been doing recently is seeing 10 and then saying, ‘Okay, well, these are the 10 that I think can do it’, and if that process doesn’t work out, then we’ll open it up,’ she explains.
‘I want to dispel the idea that everyone is famous,’ Cochrane also points out, revealing that last night she simply saw ‘six people that I know who I thought could really do the part’ for a male lead role, one of whom landed it.
‘You’ve just got so much more of a hold on the process and a transparency that way. You’re doing what you’re paid to do, which is give your opinion and curate it, rather than just getting self-tapes and shoving them in the direction of whoever.’
After years in the industry, Cochrane says she’s now cultivating the ability to speak up for herself and her process more, so she can feel comfortable and safe in her work.
‘I’m finding it so much easier to just be like, ‘No, this is how I want to work, and you’ve hired me for what I do’, so this is how I do it.’
And that’s even if it comes at the expense of being fired, which recently happened to her on a bigger studio project.
She’s also making a concerted effort to be more public in the industry, such as through Sands, as a naturally ‘really private’ person.
However, her work has been making huge waves of late, largely thanks to Wuthering Heights.
First, there’s the good: Adolescence breakout star Owen Cooper is playing the young version of Elordi’s Heathcliff, with a large chunk of that recent Netflix show’s press tour dedicated to how proud star and co-creator Stephen Graham is, alongside the wider Adolescence team, of Cooper breaking into the Hollywood leagues already.
Cochrane laughs because she and her team knew nothing about Adolescence when they cast him – there was no buzz and he just auditioned like every other boy, she confirms.
‘But I did say to Emerald and Josey [McNamara, producer] the other day, I don’t know who is now going to get more excitement, Jacob or Owen in terms of… he’s a star as well,’ she smiles.
Now we come to the bad and the ugly, with fans fierce in their criticism as they attack the casting of Robbie, 34, and Elordi, 27, as tormented young (she’s a teenager) lovers, Heathcliff and Cathy.
‘I have really had to hold back on Instagram after a glass of wine, because I think someone was like, “The casting director should be shot”,’ she replies as we broach the topic.
Her comments at the Sands talk that afternoon, also attended by Metro, have already been cited in multiple outlets as she defended the choice with her argument that ‘it’s a book, these people aren’t real’. She said she also didn’t feel the need to be ‘factually accurate’ because ‘it’s all art, it’s all creative’.
‘There’s definitely going to be some English Lit fans that are not going to be happy,’ she added to the audience, before continuing with a hint of glee: ‘Wait until you see the set design, because it’s even more shocking. And there may or may not be a dog collar in it.’
‘Nobody moaned that Dick Van Dyke wasn’t really great and British. We had millions of British actors that could have done that part [Bert in Mary Poppins] much better. That’s Hollywood,’ Cochrane argues in our chat, claiming that she’s ‘not fussed’ by any of the furore.
We get into the issue most frequently raised by fans, that of white actor Elordi’s casting – she’s seen all the comments complaining that he should have been Romany after being described by author Emily Brontë as being ‘a dark-skinned gypsy’ with black eyes.
‘You can read anything into a book and make it your interpretation. And it’s really easy to sit online and say things, but just wait until you’ve watched it, and then you can say – maybe not that I deserve to be shot – but you can say what you want!’ Cochrane suggests.
The casting professional also brings up the politics of funding and star power – Robbie is producing the film through her company LuckyChap, which was also a producing partner to Fennell on Saltburn.
‘There’s also the reality, and I think people don’t understand, that in order for any studio to pump millions in, you have to… I can’t go and find a true Romany actor. Well maybe I could, but it wasn’t a conversation.
‘But there are other things at play. We’ve done other really interesting casting.’
The supporting cast includes Oscar nominee Hong Chau as Nelly Dean and Shazad Latif as Edgar Linton.
However, Cochrane reveals she’s faced critique for it even from those close to her. ‘I’ve had friends who have gone on these Twitter rampages about how awful it is and I’m like, ‘Hi guys, that’s my job, it’s me!’’
She’ll also defend actor, writer and director Fennell to the bitter end as ‘the most intelligent woman I know’.
‘Her and Lena [Dunham], their brains are like no other. So when she’s coming to you and saying, “Well, this is what I think”, I’m all in, I trust her.’
‘I also think that they are both perfect examples of people loving to hate them and hating what they do without…’ she begins, as we talk about tall poppy syndrome. ‘But as women to work for, they are absolutely incredible. I will never hear a bad word.’
And as Cochrane later puts it in her talk: ‘I don’t want to watch Wuthering Heights as a version that is as the book. I’ve read it six or seven times, I can imagine what that looks like. I want to see Emerald’s version.’
Moving onto other fertile territory for discussion, I beg her indulgence for a moment to talk about the still-vacant role of James Bond and how she would go about casting it.
‘I’m slightly crying-slash-dying because I’ve had three calls in the last week asking if I’m casting it and I’m not!’ she grins, citing Warfare’s release – and its male cast of a very 007-appropriate age – as the likely reason. ‘I’ve never watched a single Bond in my life. I just am not the kind of… I wouldn’t be able to [comment]. It’s just not my thing.’
She also’s really happy working with her core collaborators in a space where feels protected enough to be her ‘creative, kooky self’ – and reluctant to go ‘into a system’, requiring more time away from home, while her children are young.
‘My daughter was livid that I wasn’t doing Harry Potter [the HBO reboot series]. But in my mind, maybe I’ll still be doing this job in 10 years’ time, and once they’re through school, I think that’s when I will maybe do something [big like Bond]?’ she ponders.
Cochrane also describes herself as ‘a cool cucumber’ and mentions she ‘recently worked on something where it was clear that [my] process is not… very simpatico’. I assume this was the gig she shared she was sacked from in her talk.
She then warms up to Bond, brightly adding: ‘I’ve had a thought though, Daniel Kaluuya for Bond, which will be controversial. And I would also be the kind of person to say cast Bond as a woman and then mic drop… Margot Robbie for Bond!’
I point out that she’s a rather more likely suggestion now Amazon has creative control of the franchise and is widely expected to go ham on commissioning spin-offs, and that she wouldn’t even be the first Australian 007 (that’s George Lazenby) either.
‘Or the first person who was not as the book,’ Cochrane counters. ‘I feel like saying that to all the Wuthering Heights naysayers – well, read Bond and tell me who was the perfect casting?’
Wuthering Heights will be released in cinemas on February 14, 2026.
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