Casting ODIE, Part One: The Man With the Cart

Ten days before cameras roll, it is time to tell you who is in this movie. We are starting at the center, because everything in ODIE radiates out from one man.

Owen "Odie" Harper is a handyman. Bad hip, pronounced limp, a beard that has been growing for months, and a hand-built cart that carries everything he owns. Five years ago he lost his wife and son in a car accident. He has been on the streets of Austin for 294 days. On the day our film takes place, a long-term shelter bed finally opens for him, and the only intake desk is across the city with a hard 9 p.m. curfew. One day. One curfew. Bureaucracy, temptation, and his own worst instincts standing in the way.

That role belongs to Dean Stanfield.

Casting Odie was the whole ballgame, and we knew what we were not looking for. We were not looking for a type. We were looking for a face that had a history behind it. The role is not a sermon, and Dean is not the kind of actor who performs sermons. He plays a man whose hands work all day, fixing hinges and cart wheels and a stranger's toilet, while the rest of him tries to decide whether he is allowed to begin again. When we found him, the room exhaled. Dean is in every scene of the film. Every single one. That is a fifteen-day marathon in Austin heat, and he signed up for it without blinking.

Kenzie Klem plays Monica, Odie's late wife. You will meet her the way Odie does now, in dreams and fragments, a white sundress at the edge of memory, her face always just out of frame. It is a role built almost entirely out of movement, light, and restraint, and it asks an actor to carry the emotional weight of the film while barely being seen. Kenzie carries it.

And Roderick McDaniel plays Mr. Anderson, the man waiting at the far end of Odie's long day. We will not spoil what happens between them. We will say that the film's final movement runs through Mr. Anderson's hands, that Roderick's scenes anchor the last big block of our schedule, and that when he and Dean read together, the ending of this movie stopped being words on a page.

Most of our cast is Texas-based, and most of them are undertasked by an industry that has not yet caught up to them. That is not a complaint. For us it is an advantage, because it means the people in this film came to it hungry and came to it honest.

Next week: the supporting cast, including a woman in a blue wig who we suspect will walk away with several scenes that technically belong to other people.

ODIE begins principal photography in Austin on May 18.