Twice a year I pack one small suitcase, catch the early train from Nice, and spend a week walking in and out of showrooms across Paris. Casting season is the least glamorous part of this job and, strangely, the part I'd defend the hardest.
The rhythm is brutal in a way no one warns you about. Fourteen castings in five days sounds manageable until you realise they're scattered from the Marais to the 16th, the métro is on strike (it is always, somehow, slightly on strike), and every casting director wants the same thing at the same hour. You learn to read the city like a courier: which lines connect, which don't, where you can steam a dress in a café bathroom in four minutes.
The castings themselves are short. You walk in, you hand over your book, you walk ten metres, maybe they photograph you against a white wall. Ninety seconds, two minutes at most. The maths is humbling: I once calculated that I spent eleven hours travelling that week for a cumulative twenty-five minutes of being looked at.
But here's what I've come to love. In those corridors you meet everyone - the new faces terrified in their first season, the veterans who know the doorman by name, the girls you last saw backstage in Milan. There is a solidarity in the waiting room that outsiders never see. We swap directions, phone chargers, and honest reviews of which castings respect your time.
By Friday my sneakers are grey, my book is dog-eared, and I sleep the whole train ride home. Two weeks later the options start coming in, and every one of them traces back to some ninety-second walk on a Tuesday. That's the job: you plant a week of seeds, then you go home to the sea and wait.