How One Battle After Another's Casting Director Found Chase Infiniti

As her craft is rewarded at the Academy Awards for the very first time, Oscar-winning casting director Cassandra Kulukundis talks through her eight-year journey to find breakout star Chase Infiniti. By Yasmin Omar

Cassandra Kulukundis has a formidable memory for actors. Even as a young girl, she remembers clocking the day players in Terms of Endearment (1983). ‘If you’re great in a movie, I’ll look you up and then I might use you 20 years later,’ she says. ‘The first time I ever met [director] Paul [Thomas Anderson], he was shocked that, like him, I knew certain actors that no one knew. I truly love actors. I want to find the new ones and help the seasoned ones get the right roles that stretch them and change people’s opinions of them.’ This penchant for talent-spotting formed the bedrock of the pair’s creative partnership, which began with the maximalist epic Magnolia (1999) and continues to this day.

Under Anderson’s guidance, Kulukundis has found performers to tame gushing oil derricks (There Will Be Blood, 2007), stitch gowns in a haute couture atelier (Phantom Thread, 2017) and recline on waterbeds in the San Fernando Valley (Licorice Pizza, 2021). She’s constantly building up her roster, regardless of whether she’s actually working. ‘My brain is always going with all the people that we need to be finding. I live in New York City so I walk around, I go to plays, I watch TV. I’m a godmother to 12 children, so I go to school plays. Every time I see a promising kid, I’m like, “Who’s that?” Good ideas come from anywhere.’

According to Kulukundis, Anderson is ‘very, very cryptic’ in the early stages of a project. The first inkling he gave her of who’d be required for his political thriller One Battle After Another was the prompt: ‘I’m gonna need a mixed-race girl.’ His second clue? ‘She should be good at martial arts.’ Armed with that brief, Kulukundis started watching tournaments, seeking out dancers and gymnasts, and gathering candidates in a file.

Most casting directors would then share a listing on Breakdown, a service where filmmakers advertise roles they’re looking to fill. It’s not an option for Kulukundis. ‘There’s a cult of Paul Thomas Anderson. Even though I change my name, actors (or fanatics!) figure out it’s me and get super excited he’s got a new movie coming out,’ she explains. ‘They post it online and it becomes a nightmare. Now I have to do it all on my own, without telling anybody what I’m really doing.’ To that end, when working on other films, Kulukundis would ask actresses who ‘fit the DNA profile’ of this still largely undefined PTA character to send her tapes of themselves being athletic. ‘They all thought I was crazy, but I had a method. I was up to something.’

She was actively casting One Battle in 2017, reading ‘hundreds of girls’, from 10-year-olds up to twentysomethings, for what would become the part of Willa, the biracial daughter of two revolutionaries. The actress who played her, Kulukundis eventually learned, would have to convincingly execute fight choreography, shoot a machine gun and drive in a car chase while handcuffed. But suddenly the movie fell apart, and preparation ground to a halt.

In the intervening years, Kulukundis kept scouting for Willa, looking exclusively for unknowns, whom audiences wouldn’t have any expectations of, to increase the film’s stakes (‘You’re not sure she’s gonna be OK because you don’t know this girl’). At some point, she came across a tape of Chase Infiniti, a Chicago student who taught kickboxing, performed in a K-pop dance troupe and, crucially, was yet to make her professional-acting debut. On paper, she appeared to meet the role’s physical requirements. Now, with production back up and running, it was time to put her through her paces

In March 2023, Kulukundis emailed Infiniti, requesting another self-tape. Impressed by what she received (‘When you hear it, you hear it. It sings in your ear’), the casting director invited her for a chemistry test with Leonardo DiCaprio, attached to play Willa’s stoner father, a few weeks later. The audition process, which, by Kulukundis’ own admission ‘was not easy for Chase’, stretched for months. ‘We kept throwing her in with Leo, and later with the camera and crew,’ she says.

‘I took her to a gym and got her to beat the living crap out of a bag to show Paul that she could be a killer, because she’s also so quiet and sweet and kind. She didn’t blink ever. This was the girl. She just kept getting stronger and better. It’s a big movie, it’s a hard role and there were a lot of boxes that needed to be checked. Chase did them all.’ Kulukundis offered her the part – although she was gutted that Infiniti had been cast in the limited series Presumed Innocent (2024) in the interim. ‘I was so excited to be the person who gave her her first job!’

Once the leads had been finalised, the next task was rounding out the supporting cast – no easy feat given the sheer size and variety of the ensemble, which includes a white-supremacist cabal and an auditorium of high-schoolers. Kulukundis favoured first-timers in the smaller roles, so audiences see the character, not the actor. Four of One Battle’s cannabis-growing nuns, for instance, are from the real-life Sisters of the Valley, while the military men are, by and large, actual soldiers (among them the terrifying interrogator Colonel Danvers, portrayed by federal-law enforcer James Raterman in his screen debut). ‘I had to work on their schedule,’ Kulukundis says of the servicemen. ‘I read somebody in my car on an iPad when he was in Kentucky.’

You would assume that, once the shoot began, her work was done. You’d be mistaken: she was still casting as cameras rolled. ‘I’d love to say that’s the first time that happened, but it’s not,’ she admits. ‘It happens on every single movie with Paul. I’m really used to it. That’s why I’m with them on location ready to stop, drop and roll.’ A storyline that emerged once principal photography had begun was the Underground Railroad subplot, where dozens of undocumented Latin American immigrants are funnelled out of a police-besieged California town.

‘I’d get pages and I would just run around. We need a nurse! We need kids! We need a family! It was super exciting,’ she says. ‘I’d go in and out of hospitals, I’d go in and out of homes, I’d stop people in the street, at food trucks. I kept sending pictures and videos to Paul on the fly and he’d give me answers right away. It’s kind of crazy, but that’s part of the fun of it. It’s like driving towards a cliff, you have to really speed up to make it over to the other side.’ The skateboarders, who pass messages through the community on wheels, were also a result of this beautiful chaos: Kulukundis met a guy in a skate-trick crew ‘completely by accident’ and got him to gather some friends for a scene.

Despite the near decade of upheaval, from stalled production timelines to last-minute character briefs, the casting director wouldn’t change her experience on One Battle After Another, which marks her 10th collaboration with Paul Thomas Anderson. ‘This movie happened the way it was supposed to. It all came together on number 10 because we used all the elements we’ve been practising in the nine projects before,’ she says. ‘I feel like we finally got it right.’

WATCH ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER