Ignoring low-budget logic, we whipped up a script with forty speaking parts. With little acting experience ourselves and having never auditioned an actor in our lives, rounding out our cast was something we probably shouldn't have taken for granted. As it turned out, none of that really mattered. Over the course of a few weeks in the Spring before we shot Zopp, we held a hunt for our cast. We solicited actors through some online forums as well as through a couple of newspaper and television news stories about our production. Response got pretty overwhelming at first. Actors from all over Wisconsin and Minnesota started firing us headshots and resumes, touting their interest in acting the shit out of our movie. We quickly learned two very important things about the process:
• Acting resumes are boring and inconsequential. (This, by the way, was an opinion only shared by Nick: "Just because he played Guildenstern in Carthage College's production of Silly Hamlet, it doesn't mean he can act in a movie.")*
• Nobody ever looks as hot as their headshot.**
Actually, these two things weren't that important. Resumes were fun for tidbits that you couldn't see on the headshots, like Corey Walton can do a British accent (although we didn't find out until later his North London was far better than his Glasgow). Headshots were important to evaluate vital potential character traits, like, could Matthew Glover's baby face sport facial hair? But unlike in the real world, looks and experience got you only so far with Wut Wut Alma's hardcore judgment of talent. Our hunt became more of a personality search. We tried to find people we liked. Talented sure. And capable of playing the parts we had. But we wanted nice people. Sincere people. People that would stroke our egos at all available moments. Just kidding about that part. Though I doubt it hurt. But seriously, Mike Cook wrote us a letter pretty much begging to be in our movie, but he did so in such a sincere way that we were pretty certain he wasn't going to kill or maim us. See, that's the kind of thing that would win us over. And it was a mixture of looks and experience and talen...and then more than anything coolness that made us think, "Hey, I want to spend a few days this summer with THIS person making our movie." Suddenly, with that philosophy, the roster got filled with hardly an effort or debate. And they delivered! The cast is undoubtedly one of Zopp's main stengths. Oh, and did I also mention the part about them being funny? 
*Nick is an a-hole. If you think it is pompous when people say theatre acting is a higher art form than movie acting, you should hear his counter-argument.
**One notable exception was Tim Foley. TIM FOLEY!
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