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All the Light We Cannot See

Casting Call

Director Shawn Levy Breaks Down the Audition Tapes for Marie-Laure LeBlanc

When it came to casting the role of Marie-Laure LeBlanc in All the Light We Cannot See, director and executive producer Shawn Levy wanted to make sure he represented the character’s experience as authentically as possible.

In this groundbreaking four-part limited series, adapted from Anthony Doerr’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, protagonist Marie-Laure, a French girl who is blind, flees Paris with her father (Mark Ruffalo) during World War II to seek refuge at her uncle’s (Hugh Laurie) house in Saint-Malo.

To find the perfect Marie-Laure, Levy and his team put out a global casting call for blind and low-vision actors. When Levy received a self-filmed audition tape from Aria Mia Loberti, a PhD student who had no previous acting experience, he knew that there was something special. “It leaped off the screen,” he tells Tudum.

“When you do a global casting search for a lead role like this, you’re looking for a needle in a haystack,” he says. “And in this case, we were looking for two needles,” he says.

But the director’s luck struck twice, and he also found the perfect match for young Marie-Laure. Nell Sutton — who was just 7 years old when she auditioned and also had no previous acting experience — brought a command and intelligence to her performance. Levy says discovering Loberti and Sutton “felt like something of a miracle.”

Watch Loberti and Sutton’s audition tapes above.

March 5, 2024

Transcript

[AUDITION CLIP] Aria Mia Loberti (as Marie-Laure LeBlanc): Why would you want someone else when I am perfect for the job? Who would suspect a poor blind girl?

[TITLE CARD] DIRECTOR SHAWN LEVY REACTS TO ‘ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE’ AUDITION TAPES

[thoughtful music playing]

[CLIP] Aria Mia Loberti (as Marie-Laure LeBlanc): Listen … I’m different. I know I am. I know you’ve tried to protect me, but I’m different.

Shawn Levy (director): When you do a global casting search for a lead role like this, you’re really looking for a needle in the haystack. And in the case of ‘All the Light We Cannot See,’ we were looking for two needles because I needed a 7- or 8-year-old Marie, and I also needed an 18-, 20-year-old Marie. And in the casting of Marie, I very much wanted to see if we could find a performer who was herself low vision or legally blind so that our show could have that added layer of authenticity in representing this protagonist’s experience.

[AUDITION CLIP] Aria Mia Loberti (as Marie-Laure LeBlanc): Doctor said, “If you don’t take them, your heart will give in, and then … who will make me this wonderful soup?”

Shawn Levy: What’s amazing now, watching Aria’s audition, it is very, very raw. And it was a self-filmed audition by a PhD student, and who, incredibly, had not only never acted before, this young woman had never even auditioned before.

[AUDITION CLIP] Aria Mia Loberti (as Marie-Laure LeBlanc): I was raised never to accept charity.

[OS] Shawn Levy: Yeah, no, no. No need for that cute look.

[AUDITION CLIP] Aria Mia Loberti (as Marie-Laure LeBlanc): OK.

Shawn Levy: Just tell her. There was a presence. There was a command of the frame.

[AUDITION CLIP] Aria Mia Loberti: Can I try it as I would say it if I were in this circumstance myself?

[OS] Shawn Levy: That’s a good idea.

Shawn Levy: And it leapt off the screen … I was raised never to accept charity. We were like, “Wait, we gotta see more from this young woman because there’s something special going on.”

[AUDITION CLIP] Nell Sutton (as young Marie-Laure LeBlanc): It feels beautiful, Papa.

Shawn Levy: Nell Sutton was 7 years old when I saw her audition. Nell had this light inside her.

[AUDITION CLIP] Nell Sutton (as Marie-Laure LeBlanc): It’s the most valuable thing in the whole museum.

Shawn Levy: And I was so instantly smitten with Nell, her charm, her intelligence, her humor, and I knew that if I put that girl in scenes with Mark Ruffalo, and I’d just get out of the way, that something natural and authentic was gonna happen.

[birds chirping]

Nell Sutton (as Marie-Laure LeBlanc): Papa, living things.

Mark Ruffalo (as Daniel LeBlanc): Almost. The songs are alive. Everything has a voice. You just have to listen.

Shawn Levy: Aria’s eyes have always had that luminosity, that ability for her gaze to capture light and exude the force of her spirit. And I think that’s the bedrock of this series.

[AUDITION CLIP] Aria Mia Loberti (as Marie-Laure LeBlanc): There. Now you can eat.

Shawn Levy: As I was helping her develop her acting technique, she was helping me understand what is the nature of a life without sight, and how do I represent that honestly? I needed to think about my words, be super specific in what I said and also conscious of how I said it. So she and I developed this kind of circular loop in our process, where, frankly, I think we both made each other better.

Shawn Levy: Acting is very much moment to moment, and there’s some moments that have more memorable value than others. This is one of those moments because this is the moment that I’m telling you you got the part.

[emotional music playing]

[Shawn chuckles]

[crying]

[AUDITION CLIP] Aria Mia Loberti (as Marie-Laure LeBlanc): You’re kidding me.

Shawn Levy: I’m not kidding you, Aria. Congratulations!

[Aria sobs]

Shawn Levy: The fact that we found two girls, both of whom were legally blind, both of whom had never acted before professionally, felt like something of a miracle — and it turns out that that miracle, that discovery, provided the heartbeat for the character and, really, for the entire series at large.

[AUDITION CLIP] Aria Mia Loberti (as Marie-Laure LeBlanc): See you tomorrow, monsieur.

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