Shawn Levy did something he’s never done before on a project: He put out a global, open casting call for his co-created Netflix series, All the Light We Cannot See, based on Anthony Doerr’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel.
And for good reason: Levy wanted to bring an authentic take to a novel that meant a great deal to the blind community.
All the Light We Cannot See follows, blind French girl, Marie-Laure, who with her father has to leave Paris when the Nazis invade during WWII. She goes to live with family in Britanny in the coastal town of Saint- Malo. Her story is intercut with that of Werner, who is taken from an orphanage. The Nazis want to indoctrinate him given his genius with radios, but Werner stays pure.
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“When you cast a blind young woman to play the lead, you’re getting the benefit of her lived experience,” Levy explained to us at Deadline’s TIFF studio, the miniseries having made its world premiere at the festival.
“You’re looking for a needle in a haystack, it’s not like there are agencies that represent low-vision and blind actresses,” the filmmaker adds.
Out of hundreds of submissions, Levy found Aria Mia Loberti, a recent Fulbright Scholar and Ph.D. student in Rhetoric at Pennsylvania State University and a United Nations Youth Delegate. Loberti tried out given that she was a fan of the novel. It was her first audition. Despite no formal acting training, she beat out thousands and landed what is her first-ever acting role.
“I can’t name a time where a blind girl and a blind young woman are playing a blind character at two different ages and representing their own experiences,” said Levy. Nell Sutton, who plays the younger Marie, is also blind.
On why he selected Loberti, Levy says, “there was a presence to her and an intelligence to her that came through in the midst of a numbing number of auditions.”
“The day I told her she got the lead in this, is a day I’ll never forget,” says the filmmaker.
Levy here talks with Doerr about adapting the novel to series, as well as its resonance to today in its exploration of technology.
The miniseries debuts on Nov. 2.