Who Has IT? Bravo's "IT Factor" Does

The "IT Factor," Bravo's first foray into reality-based television, is a must-see for actors, aspiring actors, Back Stage readers, and curious civilians alike. (The show, postponed from its originally scheduled September premiere due to the Sept. 11 disaster, debuted in early January.) Firmly plugged into the public's seemingly endless fascination with the "biz," nobody on this 13-part series ever eats a bug or builds a tent. Rather, the audience follows a dozen young New York actors through a full six months in their endless daily grind of classes, auditions, rejections, and sometimes actually getting the part. And the audience learns who the winners are in the very first episode, a half-hour, highly edited version of the feeding frenzy that took place for two weeks back in February 2001, when 2,500 actors—1,000 from a Back Stage ad, the rest from submissions and the casting director's own files—auditioned for the 12 slots created by producers Nicole Torre, David Clair, and Lauren Friedland. The young actors, all relatively unknown, range from rank beginners (it was Kevin Bulla's first audition) to a Tony winner (in 1991, then 11-year-old Daisy Eagan received her award for "The Secret Garden" from icon Audrey Hepburn).

The job of choosing this hardy band fell to veteran casting director Billy Hopkins ("The Shipping News," "Kate and Leopold," and "Monster's Ball"), who not only discovered Macaulay Culkin (and recently cast the Off-Broadway version of Culkin's London success, "Madame Melville"), but also cast Madonna in "Desperately Seeking Susan." Hopkins revealed to Back Stage that he had never cast a reality-based show before, explaining, "It's very different from casting for a fiction series. [He cast the pilot for "Sex and the City."] There are plenty of good actors who weren't chosen because the 'IT' criteria involved both personality and talent. Usually, an actor covers up his or her own persona to read for a role. Here, the producers were surprised when I asked for a monologue, but I said, 'You need to know that they can act; otherwise, why bother hiring me?' Of course, I'd seen 'Survivor,' so I knew you have to have the bitchy one, the nice one, etc…. I was looking for different personality types and I knew several of the actors who were finally chosen, but what was amazing to me, after all this time, was how many I didn't know before." Hopkins' best audition advice: "Understand the fine art of polite aggressiveness (which an actor needs) and never put a casting person on the defensive."

Hopkins culled a multi-ethnic group of seven women and five men, including three native New Yorkers (Eagan, Latarsha Rose, and Chelsea Lagos), two Canadians (Miranda Black and Katherine Winnick), one Amerasian (Michaela Conlin), and one openly gay actor (P.J. Mehaffey). We talked with one of the producers and four of the actors who were eager to share their experiences.