The film’s casting director and grown-up star, Julianne Moore, on the remarkable debut of Millicent Simmond

by Lisa Liebman

OCTOBER 20, 2017 10:00 AM

At the heart of Todd Haynes’s sophisticated new family film, Wonderstruck, is the innocent curiosity of two intrepid 12-year-old deaf runaways. Based on the novel by Brian Selznick, Haynes’s visually arresting movie, which opens on Friday, interweaves the stories of Rose (Millicent Simmonds), a New Jersey girl in 1927, and Ben (Oakes Fegley), a Minnesota boy in 1977. Constrained by her overbearing father, Rose finds solace at the movies, particularly those of screen star Lillian Mayhew (Julianne Moore). Much like the cinema she loves, her story is told in black and white and accompanied only by the film’s evocative Carter Burwell score. Meanwhile, Ben is grieving the sudden loss of his librarian mother (Michelle Williams), and wants answers about the father he’s never known—even after a freak accident deafens him. Both kids end up in New York City, where they find connection—to family, and each other—at the Museum of Natural History.

The challenge for Haynes, a master of adult storytelling, was finding the right child actors to carry his film—especially because he wanted a deaf actress to play Rose. Casting director Laura Rosenthal, who’s worked with Haynes for 20 years—and says the director is “delightfully in touch with his childlike side”—was tasked with filling those parts, which were open to kids with no acting experience. After casting a wide net, the roles of Ben and Jaime—the independent New York City kid Ben befriends—went to “veterans” Fegley, recently seen in Disney’s Pete’s Dragon, and Jaden Michael, of Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson.

But finding Rose took an extensive, worldwide search that included contacting schools for the deaf and hearing-impaired, as well as deaf theater companies. In Bountiful, Utah, then-13-year-old Simmonds, who uses American Sign Language (A.S.L.), and can lip-read (but doesn’t rely on it to communicate), heard about the open call from her deaf-school drama teacher. Her introductory tape was one of…See full article at Vanity Fair