Stunt Casting Isn't the Problem
How certainty became Broadway's currency (and who's paying the price).
It feels impossible to talk about Broadway right now without talking about stunt casting.
Not as a scandal or some kind of moral failure. Just as a fact of the landscape.
You don’t even need me to name an example. I’m sure there’s already someone (or several someones) that come to mind.
This isn’t new. Broadway has always flirted with fame. But something about the volume of it now—the frequency, the reliance, the way it feels increasingly baked into the business model—suggests a shift.
And then, last week, on CBS Sunday Morning, Carrie Coon said the quiet part out loud: that five years ago, this path wouldn’t have existed for her. That talent alone is no longer enough. That now, in order to do a play on Broadway, you need to arrive with heat already attached.
What struck me wasn’t the critique itself, but that it came from inside the system. From a position that, on paper, looks like success. Prestige television. Cultural visibility. The very currency Broadway now openly courts.
Because every time stunt casting comes up, the conversation collapses into binaries: good or bad, fair or unfair, cynical or necessary.
But listening to Carrie, it became clear that those frames don’t quite hold. That this isn’t really a story about individual casting choices at all. It’s about an ecosystem responding to pressure.
That’s the part I want to sit with here. Not to assign blame or offer an easy fix—but to look more closely at why casting works the way it does now, and what that pressure asks of artists on both sides of the equation.
Let’s get into it.
The Pressure
Most of the forces shaping Broadway right now live in budgets and spreadsheets. In capitalization meetings and pitch decks. In the quiet math that happens long before a casting notice ever goes out.
Rising production costs. Shorter runways. A business model almost entirely dependent on private capital, in a country that offers basically zero public support for the arts.
Plus, we’re in an economy with higher costs. Of living. Of labor. Of everything. Regardless of what the current administration would have us believe, prices are on the rise and tolerance for risk is down.
And when risk tolerance shrinks, everything downstream tightens with it.
In our business, casting is one of the few places we can clearly see that pressure.
It’s easy to frame stunt casting as a creative choice, but more often it functions as a form of risk management. Familiarity becomes insurance. A known “name” doesn’t just sell tickets—it steadies investors, guarantees press, justifies the scale of the bet.
That’s the shift Carrie was pointing to. Not that Broadway creatives or producers stopped caring about talent—but that talent, or a groundbreaking original piece, or even strong brand IP alone no longer offsets uncertainty.
And this pressure—from a fragile system trying to keep itself upright—never stays abstract. It moves. Quietly. Unevenly. Until it lands on people.
Which is where the real story starts.
On The Inside
For a lot of theater actors, this pressure looks like a recalibration of what feels possible.
Opportunities narrow. The ladder gets steeper, then thinner. Not because the work isn’t good enough—but because “good enough” no longer answers the question everyone is actually asking: will this sell?
Theater has historically been a place where careers were built through craft. Where presence mattered more than profile. Where momentum came from doing the work, night after night, in front of a live audience.
But when casting becomes a primary tool for managing risk, unfamiliarity starts to read as liability. Discovery feels expensive. Taking a chance feels indulgent.
The burden on artists grows. It changes the relationship to the work. Comparison creeps in. Strategy replaces skill-building. Visibility starts to matter more than ability.
For many, the shift has been painful and disorienting. The alignment of luck, timing, and talent feels less and less likely.
Some actors adapt. Others opt out—not because they stopped loving theater, but because the math stopped math-ing.
But this is only one side of the coin.
For actors whose names fall above the title, there’s a different flavor of pressure.
Especially for artists who actually care about craft. About rehearsal. About being in the room for the right reasons. Theater, for many of them, is the place they come to strip away the machinery of fame and get back in the habit of truth-telling in front of an audience.
But stunt casting collapses that distinction.
You’re not just an actor. You’re a metric. A strategy. A stabilizer. A risk buffer. The business isn’t separate from the work—it sits on your shoulders while you’re trying to make it.
This doesn’t erase the privilege. It doesn’t flatten the power imbalance. But it does complicate the story.
Because being wanted for your draw is not the same as being wanted for your work. And knowing the difference—feeling it, night after night—changes the experience in ways that aren’t always obvious.
And when both of these things are true at the same time—when theater actors are squeezed out by unfamiliarity, and celebrities are pulled in under the weight of expectation—a pattern starts to take shape.
Add ‘Em Up
Here’s what we know: a system under pressure looks for stability. Casting becomes one of the few levers available. Celebrities are asked to carry expectation. Theater actors feel forced to find visibility (and stability) elsewhere.
Everyone is compensating for uncertainty in their own way. Not because they want to—but because the conditions demand it.
This is where tthe shorthand diagnosis of a ‘broken system’ starts to fall apart.
Because what’s happening here isn’t collapse or failure. It’s reaction and restriction.
The Hard Truth
The system isn’t broken. It’s constricted. And that distinction matters.
A broken system stops functioning completely. It’s dead. A constricted one keeps breathing—but through a narrowing passage. Less air. Less room to maneuver. Less tolerance for what hasn’t already proven it can survive the squeeze.
There is still good work getting made. Sometimes even great work. But it’s being made inside a tighter channel. Smaller margins for error. Fewer risks feel worth taking. Fewer unknowns feel worth the bet. Newness isn’t impossible—but it often requires momentum from somewhere else.
Over time, that pressure reshapes behavior.
Craft doesn’t disappear—but it’s no longer sufficient on its own. Careers feel less cumulative and more conditional, shaped as much by optics as by the work itself. Certainty starts to feel safer than curiosity. Familiarity more responsible than experimentation.
And maybe that’s what’s actually broken. Not the system itself—but our tolerance for uncertainty inside it.
Our willingness to sit with not-knowing. To make room for work that hasn’t fully found itself yet. To give artist opportunities to grow into themselves. To trust process over proof.
So no, I don’t think there’s a simple fix or that we need to “make Broadway great again.”
But if stunt casting has become one of the clearest signals of where the system feels tightest, maybe it can also point us toward what we need for whatever comes next.
More uncertainty. More unknowns. More up-and-comers. More risk. More trust. More time. More space. More nuance. More questions. More fun. More faith. More magic. And yes—more Love.
One last thing…
Clearly, that Carrie Coon clip stirred something in me.
And I wasn’t the only one. The comments and shares from artists at every stage of their careers was overwhelming. But not shocking.
Here’s the thing: she didn’t mythologize her career. She didn’t pretend it was inevitable. She didn’t wrap it in language about destiny or worthiness or “earning it.”
She just said the truth: if I hadn’t been given those opportunities, I wouldn’t be here.
That’s it.
And I think that landed so hard because so many artists are living inside that sentence right now.
Every audition can sort-of feel like a Hail Mary. Which is a football reference for throwing the ball deep, and hoping someone catches it.
It’s not that the work doesn’t matter. It’s that the relationship between the work and what comes next has grown much harder to trace.
We’re asked to keeping showing up, keep making, keep offering, keep risking, keep taping, keep learning, keep going, even when the feedback loop has gone quiet.
And maybe that’s what Carrie gave people in those thirty seconds.
Not a roadmap. Not reassurance. Just permission to tell the truth about how contingent this all is.
About how much of a career is shaped not just by talent, but by timing. Access. Visibility. Luck. And the fragile chain of events that lets someone be seen at all.
I don’t know what to do with that yet. But I do know it made a lot of artists feel less alone. And right now, that feels like something.
See you next week ♥️
—Matt
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