Nina Gold earns remarkable casting honor after 100+ projects
More than 100 projects into her career, casting director Nina Gold is collecting a first-of-its-kind trophy. She will receive the inaugural Deadline Disruptor Achievement in Casting Award this weekend at the 34th Hamptons International Film Festival, which runs Oct. 2-12 on New York’s East End, Deadline announced on Thursday, Oct. 1.
The festival created the prize with Deadline to recognize casting directors whose work has changed how audiences experience performance on screen.
Why Nina Gold was picked first
Gold has six Emmy Awards, for “Baby Reindeer,” “John Adams,” “Game of Thrones” and “The Crown,” and she earned an Oscar nomination for “Hamnet” at the 2026 Academy Awards, the first year the Academy handed out a casting prize.
Her 2026 workload is just as crowded. Amazon MGM Studios hired Nina Gold to cast the 26th James Bond film and find the next 007, one of the most closely watched casting searches in years. Deadline also credits her with Sam Mendes’ four planned Beatles films, the spy series “Slow Horses,” Greta Gerwig’s “Narnia” movie and J.J. Abrams’ “The Great Beyond.”
“Nina Gold is one of the most storied and iconic casting directors working today,” said David Nugent, chief creative officer of HamptonsFilm. He added that “her influence on the craft of casting is impossible to overstate.”
Deadline President Ellie Duque called Gold one of the industry’s “pillars” who “has shaped and elevated the art of bringing a character to life on screen.”
3 films she cast are at the festival
Three titles on this year’s HIFF slate carry Gold’s casting credit:
- “Tender Loving Care,” Mike Leigh’s new drama, starring Kate O’Flynn, Alice Bailey Johnson, Marion Bailey and Paul Jesson. It debuted at the Telluride Film Festival, and Bleecker Street opens it Dec. 4.
- “A Talent for Murder,” from director Anton Corbijn, with Helen Mirren as novelist Patricia Highsmith alongside Alden Ehrenreich and Olivia Cooke.
- “Clarissa,” Arie and Chuko Esiri’s take on Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway,” starring Sophie Okonedo, David Oyelowo, Ayo Edebiri and Toheeb Jimoh.
Three decades with Mike Leigh
“Tender Loving Care” is Gold’s ninth film with Leigh, and the festival is honoring her in part for that work. In a statement, she thanked the festival and pointed to the partnership: “I have the greatest pride in the work I have done with Mike Leigh and our collaborations over the last thirty years.”
She added that bringing the film to the Hamptons “means a great deal.”
The partnership goes back to a 1992 McDonald’s commercial Leigh directed, which led to Gold casting his 1999 film “Topsy-Turvy,” her first major feature, according to her biography. Since then, Nina Gold has cast “The King’s Speech,” “Les Misérables” and five “Star Wars” films, and she received a special BAFTA award in 2016.
A milestone year for HIFF
The 34th edition will show more than 140 films, including seven feature world premieres and eight short-film world premieres, according to Deadline. It will also host the festival’s first IMAX screening, the U.S. IMAX premiere of “Everest: The Other Side.”
Other highlights include 10 U.S. premieres, among them “Bunker,” and 15 East Coast premieres fresh from Telluride and Venice, such as “Elsinore,” “Wild Horse Nine” and “The Liberation.” For more festival and awards coverage, visit our movies section.