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“I think the gift of being a casting director is giving another human being the space to show you who they are, and to pick up on all of those really important human aspects that enable somebody to really be a good storyteller,” she says.

“A casting director is hiring an actor to be the vessel for this story and there is nothing better than sitting across from somebody in a room and really getting a sense of who they are.”

“We’ve decided to go in a different direction” was the standard line Hollywood casting director Tess Sanchez delivered for more than 20 years.

Rather than real names, she often applies her casting director eye to who that person would be portrayed by in a film to allow readers to imagine the scenario like a movie scene: she describes a dead-end boyfriend as looking like Topher Grace so he becomes “Topher.”

She tells The Times, “My belief is that once a casting director, always a casting director. I tend to do it in my private life too because that’s just the way my brain works. … I love to be a matchmaker, and I think of it as sort of casting somebody’s lover or boyfriend. I love setting people up.”