Swimmers (film) - Casting

Casting

• Tara Devon Gallagher plays the pivotal role of 11-year-old Emma Tyler, whose passion for swimming is suddenly disrupted by an ear injury requiring expensive surgery. Although Gallagher never had an acting class before – much less ever acted, she beat out hundreds of other preteens from New York, Los Angeles and Maryland. Producers said that they were blown away in her initial audition when they asked her to improvise a line of dialog in the script. Sadler says, "it was clear she was seeing and experiencing those things in her mind's eye."
• Robert Knott as Will Tyler, a Chesapeake Bay waterman who struggles to hold onto his livelihood. Sadler discovered Knott through actor Ed Harris, who had served as one of Sadler’s advisors at the Sundance Institute Directing Workshop and had previously cast Knott as his brother in his critically acclaimed film, Pollock. Harris was so impressed with the Swimmers script that he had shown it to Knott before there was any discussion about who would play Will Tyler in the film.
• Cherry Jones as Julia Tyler, the fiercely-determined wife of Will Tyler. Jones says of her character, "She's the matriarch of a family who's bottoming out, and she has got to be the glue that binds everything together."
• Shawn Hatosy as Clyde Tyler, the second son who becomes the town’s patrolman rather than a waterman like his dad. From the moment Hatosy received the script for Swimmers he said the story really affected him, saying "The story and the way Doug wrote it – from the perspective of the little girl – just found its way into me." Being from Maryland originally, Hatosy also had a real soft spot for anything that has to do with his homestate. Aware that the production would be auditioning actors the following week, he called producer Melanie Backer and persuaded her to accompany him to a screening of his latest film, Dallas 362. Backer, who was already a Hatosy fan from his work in Outside Providence immediately arranged a meeting with writer-director Doug Sadler. Several hours later, Hatosy had the role.
• Sarah Paulson as Merrill, the mysterious, kohl-eyed beauty who suddenly turns up in town in a desperate attempt to understand her own emotionally troubled past. Swimmers casting director Ellen Parks first spotted Paulson in the 1998 off-Broadway hit, Killer Joe, with Scott Glenn and Amanda Plummer.