“Allison doesnt just find us actors she finds us people we want to work with the rest of our lives” the director Judd...
“Allison doesn’t just find us actors; she finds us people we want to work with the rest of our lives,” the director Judd Apatow said.Photograph by Dolly Faibyshev

The first scene of “Other Space,” a new sci-fi sitcom by Paul Feig, which streams on Yahoo on April 14th, begins with one of the show’s central characters, a hapless spaceship captain named Stewart Lipinski, navigating the ship through an asteroid shower while eating a hot dog. On a Saturday last August, however, on the first day of casting, the script was in flux and the hot dog was still written as a banana. Allison Jones, the casting director, was reading the scene with actors trying out for the Stewart role, who faced a decision: audition with a real banana, or just pretend to eat one?

Jones works out of a bungalow in the quaint Larchmont neighborhood of Los Angeles. The rooms of the house are airy and filled with mementos of her thirty-year-long career in Hollywood: bobble-heads of characters from “The Office,” which Jones cast; a bulletin board collaged with head shots. In the waiting room, next to the sign-in sheet, a bowl of candies and bubble gum greets nervous actors. The audition room is austere, with no windows and just two chairs. Jones hates asking her staff to work on weekends—“They don’t make enough money,” she said—so she was alone, with a video camera mounted on a tripod, reading lines as one aspiring Stewart after another passed through, four minutes apart. Most of the actors pretended to eat a banana, but some had brought in a real one, which suggested to Jones that they were trying a little too hard. Early in the day, a young man came in wearing suspenders over a Stanford T-shirt and with military ribbons taped to his chest. When he pulled a banana out of his pocket, Jones quietly sighed. A few moments later, it popped out of its peel and landed at Jones’s feet. This was nothing, she later told me; once, during an emotional table read, an actress accidentally punched her in the face.

In the early days of Hollywood, casting directors had little decision-making power. Most working actors were signed to individual studios, and casting mainly involved matching individuals to roles based on the actor’s availability and type. In the nineteen-sixties, as the studio system broke down, the influence of casting directors grew. Heavyweights like Marion Dougherty discovered young talent on Broadway and persuaded directors to hire such unknowns as Al Pacino, Paul Newman, and Robert Duvall. Jones began her career with the two-beats-and-a-punch-line sitcoms of the nineteen-eighties, but, in working with Feig and the director Judd Apatow, she was required to try something revolutionary: find comedic actors who, more than just delivering jokes, could improvise and riff on their lines, creating something altogether different from what was on the page.

In the process, Jones has helped give rise to a new kind of American comedy. In 1999, she cast Seth Rogen, James Franco, and Jason Segel in the critically acclaimed, poorly watched teen series “Freaks and Geeks.” The show, created and written by Feig and produced by Apatow, was a coming-of-age story set in the suburban Michigan of Feig’s youth. Jones won the show’s only Emmy, for her casting. Several years later, she met with a young, sweaty Jonah Hill, who was desperate for an introduction to Apatow. She told Apatow that Hill was weird and hilarious. That sufficed; Apatow expanded a cameo part for Hill in “The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” as an odd but lovable eBay customer. Two years later, Hill was cast with Michael Cera in “Superbad,” a raunchy teen comedy that Apatow produced. It was left to Jones to find their nerdier-than-thou friend McLovin. Jones posted notices seeking high-school students in L.A. After seeing thousands of candidates, she caught a glimpse of a camera-phone head shot sent in by a sixteen-year-old named Christopher Mintz-Plasse. She called the director, Greg Mottola, and excitedly said, “I think I found McLovin; he’s like Dill from ‘To Kill a Mockingbird.’ ” Jones told me, “You could tell he was a kid who probably had seen the inside of a locker.” Since then, Mintz-Plasse has starred in six movies.

“Allison doesn’t just find us actors; she finds us people we want to work with the rest of our lives,” Apatow said. “That’s good, because the older you get you don’t want to see tons of people. I know if Allison sends two they will both be great.” Feig said, “Years from now, she will be recognized as having changed the face of comedy as much as any comedy filmmaker. All the best comedy people have come through her or from her.” Jones did the casting for Apatow’s 2007 film, “Knocked Up,” and for Feig’s 2011 comedy, “Bridesmaids.” This summer, Feig will direct a remake of “Ghostbusters,” with all-female stars and a supporting cast assembled by Jones; already it’s the most highly anticipated comedy of 2016.

Jones is in her fifties, and nearly six feet tall, with unruly curly hair. In jeans and blouses from Liberty, she comes across as someone’s favorite aunt. She met Feig more than twenty-five years ago, when he was a struggling actor, and their professional relationship deepened through their collaboration on “Freaks and Geeks.” In 2013, Feig reacquired “Other Space” from Twentieth Century Fox Television, where it had been stuck for years. Feig once described the show in the Times as a sci-fi version of “The Office.” The lead character, Stewart Lipinski, is a dorky twentysomething space commander. He is assisted by Karen, his sister, and Michael, his best friend, both of whom are miffed at having been passed over for the position. The other crew members are Kent, a wealthy humanoid who has wakened from a chemical bath; Tina, Stewart’s ditzy love interest; and Natasha, a Spock-like virtual sexbot and the ship’s operating system, who appears on a computer screen.

By the time Jones finishes reading a script, she already has ideas about which actors might be right for the roles—and who can handle the pressure of constantly improvising during the eighty-hour workweek that shooting a television comedy often requires. But she also likes the surprise of the unknown, and on the first day of casting she was wading through fifty or so candidates chosen from some nine thousand who had appealed to her in online head shots. She was looking in particular for “Paul Feig types,” well-meaning nerds who are endearing in their benevolent oddness. “She finds people that your heart can break for,” the actor Paul Rudd told me. By lunchtime, however, Jones hadn’t seen anyone worth showing to Feig. “They’re forcing it,” she said. “It’s not real. You’re either a nerd or you’re not.”

Between auditions, to lift her spirits, Jones watched an old “Saturday Night Live” sketch of Will Ferrell spoofing James Lipton. At one point, she whispered, “I’m going to hit the ladies’ room and blow my brains out.” But she caught a glimpse of someone interesting in the waiting room, and when she came back her eyes were alight.

“Wait till you see the next guy! He’s a real goober. He’s the real thing. I just hope he can talk.”

Nick Azarian was a mountain of hair nesting on a tiny, teen-age face. He carried a binder and wore a turtleneck with a space-camp sticker. As he walked in, a wide smile broke across Jones’s face. According to his IMDb résumé, Azarian, who is from Charlotte, was a “full-out power geek.” He told Jones that he’d found the shirt at Goodwill and printed the sticker himself.

“God bless you!” Jones said.

Azarian read the part. When his four minutes were up, he left the room but then returned, blushing—he’d forgotten his binder. He wasn’t right for the lead, but he had jolted Jones awake.

“See? That’s the face we’re looking for,” she said. “A real face. You can’t fake that face. I’ll show him to Paul; he’ll find something for him.” She sighed dreamily. “That face!”

“I don’t know why I’m drawn to nerds,” Jones told me recently over a burger at the Astro Burger, a restaurant near her office. Her face brightened and she pushed her glasses up on her nose. She admitted that on Valentine’s Day she had stayed up till 3 A.M. watching the Weather Channel, mesmerized by Jim Cantore’s dancing reaction to thundersnow. “I mean, why am I obsessed with the people on the Weather Channel? Because they’re so pure, nice, and nerdy. There’s nothing cynical about them.” For Jones, the definition of “nerd” is broad enough to include every Jack Lemmon role, Elaine May in her 1971 film “A New Leaf,” and Cecil Vyse, the benign but misguided character played by Daniel Day-Lewis in the Merchant Ivory adaptation of “A Room with a View.”

The category might also include Jones. When I told Apatow that I was writing about her, he asked, “What does she do outside of work? What are her hobbies? Please tell me, because I don’t know.” Jones is single and enjoys sewing. Sometimes she visits nephews and nieces on the Eastern Seaboard. Mostly, she works. “I’m the person that people forget they met,” she said. She lives in a modest house not far from her office, but she preferred not to show it. Instead, on the Saturday after the first day of casting, she offered a tour of her storage space, in Studio City. We drove there in her black Audi S.U.V. She opened a rattling, white sliding door to her space, revealing thirty years of boxes, files, and memorabilia.

Jones grew up in Needham, Massachusetts, outside Boston, the second youngest of six children. Her father, an executive at John Hancock, loved Walter Matthau and hated John F. Kennedy; her mother managed the kids. Growing up, Jones watched quietly as her parents and her older siblings battled over Vietnam and long hair. “I was the fifth of six kids,” Jones said. “I didn’t want to make any adult pissed off. I’m still terrified of fucking up, because the business is a little bit of that same mentality—who do you blame for something that’s a failure? Gotta blame casting.”

Jones credits her brothers with shaping her comedic tastes. One brother and his friends made up stories called “Christmas Tragedies,” for which they invented and recited straight-faced accounts of misery—Jones fondly recalled a bit in which a plane full of pregnant nuns crashes into an orphanage. “I admired so much how the boys could tell each other to fuck off without anyone getting mad,” she said. “The girls I knew got so sensitive. My brothers were not prim and proper.”

She enjoyed watching a “real but weird” local program called “Community Auditions,” a low-budget precursor to “American Idol,” in which amateurs would sing and perform, sometimes backed by a lumbering orchestra. Later, at Pomona College, in California, she and her friends watched the first episodes of “Saturday Night Live.” She loved comedy, but it seemed impractical; she earned an M.B.A. at U.C.L.A. and endured a year at a New York advertising firm, working on the Stroh’s beer account. She recalled a moment at business school when she froze just before she was due to give a presentation.

“I just couldn’t do it,” Jones told me. “I got massive stagefright and started shaking. The next presentation, I did it from a humorous point of view, and then I could do it.”

Jones returned to California and enrolled in the producer program at the American Film Institute. One of her early assignments was to cast another student’s adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s short story “The Potato Elf.” She showed me a file containing head shots and film memos from the project. “I rejected Anjelica Huston,” Jones said. “At that time, she was John Huston’s daughter, Jack Nicholson’s girlfriend, and a model. That was her claim to fame. Thirty years later, I still don’t know what I’m doing.” Jones confessed that she passed on Ryan Gosling for a pilot and chose not to bring Kristen Wiig back for a second audition for “The Office.”

Her first significant job out of school was as a casting assistant on “Family Ties.” She soon realized the extent to which casting could make or break a show. There were spirited battles internally over whether Michael J. Fox was right for the role of the teen-age conservative Alex P. Keaton, with some executives arguing that he was too short and not charismatic enough. (Fox became the breakout star of the show.) In her downtime, she watched films and TV shows and, when the credits rolled, wrote down the names of promising comedians and actors. She showed me a tiny, tattered notebook that read, “Carson: 11/28/86 Ellen?” It was Ellen DeGeneres’s first appearance on the “Tonight Show.” (The next line read, “Ordered two salads from Mr. Pizza.”)

Jones found regular work on “Family Ties” and “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” but she was also casting sitcom pilots. In one, a short-lived TV show called “Grand,” she had to cast the role of “wolf boy,” a teen-ager who was raised in the forest by wolves. The applicants included a young Leonardo DiCaprio. But Jones often chafed at working for the networks. One writer complained that DiCaprio and the other kids “looked too well-fed.” She brought in Jim Carrey for another project, but his mouth was deemed to be too big. Producers would insist that Jones call agents late at night and inform them that their client need not show up in the morning. She has had to fire Dane Cook and Pauly Shore. “Other Space” is part of Yahoo’s first wave of original programming, and its budget is a sliver of what “Ghostbusters” will spend. But, for Jones, part of the appeal is that it’s not a network show.

“The networks micromanage so much that it just makes me fucking berserk,” she told me. “So I can’t do it. I’m just cranky all the time, and I hate being that way.”

In the nineteen-eighties, even smart comedies like “WKRP in Cincinnati” featured misfits who were nonetheless gorgeous. Through her casting, Jones has introduced actors who more closely resemble people in real life. She found Andy Buckley, Michael Scott’s boss on “The Office,” at a farmers’ market in L.A., several years after Buckley had given up acting to become a stockbroker. The “Office” character Phyllis, a feisty, heavyset saleswoman, is played by Phyllis Smith, who was not trained as an actor; for several years she had worked as Jones’s casting associate. In 2013, Jones cast Joe Lo Truglio, a nebbish comedian, as a detective alongside Andy Samberg on the police comedy “Brooklyn Nine-Nine.” Lo Truglio had auditioned for Jones dozens of times in the past two decades. “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” won a Golden Globe Award for best comedy series during its first season.

In Studio City, Jones was still opening boxes and sifting through artifacts: green “Family Ties” coffee cups, a publicity photo of an adolescent Will Smith leaning between pillars, clippings from old TV Guides. I caught sight of a dusty spec script from the early nineteen-nineties that had the words “Seinfeld” and “Allison Jones” on it. I asked if she had written a script for “Seinfeld.” Jones tried to change the subject, then claimed that she could remember only the subplot, which turned on the idea that in 1985 Kramer had been aboard the Achille Lauro when Palestinian terrorists seized the cruise ship. It was Kramer, not the terrorists, who (accidentally) pushed Leon Klinghoffer overboard.

Jeff Garlin, a principal actor on “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and a longtime friend of Jones’s, later told me that he’d read the script. “It was hilarious,” he said, and added that she was instrumental in helping him write his 2006 comedy, “I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With.” “I always try to get her to write more. She is so talented.”

Jones had shown the script to a couple of agents, one of whom told her, incorrectly, that she had misspelled “George Constanza.” “They had some stupid comments and I got discouraged, like an idiot,” she said. She once wrote spec scripts for “Family Ties” and “Murphy Brown,” but those also went nowhere, and she is no longer writing. She put the “Seinfeld” script back into a box and sealed it up. “I’m still really terrified, but not as afraid as I used to be.”

The files she turned up from “Freaks and Geeks” had a Dead Sea Scrolls feel about them—modern comedy at Year One. The show’s plot centered on three nerds and five burnouts; Apatow and Feig told Jones to find the kids that never get cast. Jones and her team saw hundreds of prospects in Los Angeles, New York, Vancouver, and Chicago. Feig and Apatow saw Rogen on tape and invited him to an open call in Vancouver, pegging him to play Ken, a sarcastic burnout. She spotted Segel, a handsome high-school basketball player, and cast him as Nick, a vulnerable drummer with a Rush obsession and a jackass dad. She remembered Franco from “1973,” a failed pilot that she had cast that year, and slotted him as Daniel Desario, a handsome but insecure James Dean wannabe.

“When Jones found Jason, I didn’t know what to do with him,” Feig told me. “He wasn’t what I was looking for. Judd said the beauty is we can rewrite to fit these great people that Allison’s found.”

In late 1998, at a Los Angeles casting call, Jones met the ultimate Feig type: a gangly, freckle-faced kid named Martin Starr. “When Martin walked in, I remember thinking, Please, please be able to talk,” Jones said. He was cast as one of three freshman geeks trying to make it through the day without being humiliated. (He now stars on HBO’s “Silicon Valley.”) Later, Jones went on to cast Shia LaBeouf as a terrified school mascot and Lizzy Caplan as Segel’s disco-loving girlfriend. She spent weeks trying to get a script to a teen-age Scarlett Johansson. A very young Shailene Woodley auditioned, and Jones scrawled “very talkative” next to her name. The cast didn’t meet as a whole until the first table read, to go through the pilot script together. Feig, Apatow, and Jones saw the glimmers of a more realistic comedy, in which the laughs come from the human foibles of the nerds and burnouts who make up the cast. Feig has called it “pushed reality.”

“It’s a sensibility,” he told me over breakfast one morning. “I don’t want anybody ever doing things where they feel fake, because that’s a kind of nineties style of comedy—‘Look how funny I am!’ ” He mentioned Dwight Schrute, the scheming but harmless salesman played by Rainn Wilson, on “The Office.”

“Dwight’s a really crazy character,” Feig said. “But he so believes it, he’s so grounded, and he’s not winking at us. That’s what makes you go, ‘That’s hilarious.’ The key is finding people who have a natural governor. I can push them and push them and they won’t go into cartoon land.” Wilson was the first actor Jones saw when she was casting the show’s pilot. “Everyone is obsessed with ‘heat,’ who’s hot,” Jeff Garlin said. “But Allison has never cared about who’s hot, and she’s never changed what she thought was funny.”

Jones’s collaboration with Apatow has given rise to a brand of “dude humor”—bumbling young guys who behave badly but have hearts of plated gold. “It’s a little strange, since they’re so much younger than me and talk so much about vaginas,” Jones said at one point. In the past couple of years, critics of Apatow have suggested that his work is misogynistic. Jones said that it just reminded her of her older brothers. Still, she looked forward to casting “Ghostbusters.”

“It’s nice to get a break from the testosterone every once in a while,” she said. “I was thrilled to do ‘Bridesmaids’—it was a true ensemble of odd characters, all of whom I had observed in real life. There wasn’t one scene that called for a push-up bra. Most female descriptions in screenplays and TV scripts—and I am not kidding—are basically ‘astonishingly beautiful, even without makeup,’ and ‘brilliant.’ Never just beautiful, always astonishingly so.”

A few days after the first audition, Jones conducted another, for the part of Karen, Stewart’s sister in “Other Space”; she set up her video camera while her assistant, Ben Harris, took a seat and prepared to read with the actresses.

As the film industry has turned digital, the technical process of editing has become far less painful, but it has created more work. Many of the directors who collaborate with Jones shoot exponentially more film than a comedy in the nineteen-nineties might have. (For “Knocked Up,” Apatow shot the equivalent of more than a million feet of film, four times more than Ron Shelton shot in making the 1988 classic “Bull Durham.”) It has also made Jones’s ability to find prodigies more important, since so much of the film’s comedy emerges in post-production.

The Karen role was challenging: the character has been passed over for command in favor of Stewart, so she must be both crabby and funny. Jones had already seen half a dozen actresses when Milana Vayntrub sat down in the waiting room, wearing glasses and a prim plaid dress with a white collar. To break the tension in crowded audition rooms, Vayntrub told me, she likes to slurp water loudly from a cup, see who laughs, and befriend them. She was waiting alone for Jones, so she repeated a mantra from her acting coach: “I release and destroy my need to get this part. I am just here to tickle myself and play in these circumstances. This is not a scene; I am just going to behave as though it’s really happening.”

Vayntrub was born in Uzbekistan and grew up in a Russian enclave of West Hollywood. Jones first saw her in 2014, at an audition for the Billy Crystal sitcom “The Comedians.”

“Milana Vayntrub, how are you?” Jones asked.

Vayntrub’s face scrunched up; Robin Williams had died the day before. “I’m kinda shitty, kinda sad,” she said.

“I know, it’s just the most awful thing,” Jones said. “Just awful.”

That set Vayntrub at ease, she later told me: “I knew I could say that to her and that she was connected to me as a person and not just like a number.” She stumbled early in Karen’s monologue, when she tells Stewart that she feels that he’s always upstaging her. But she found her rhythm, pointing out that Stewart even won the part of Juliet over her in drama club, then improvised: “You were beautiful. For the record, you looked really great in the Juliet corset. The painted-on cleavage was a really nice touch.”

Jones laughed along during Vayntrub’s four minutes, nodding encouragingly. Jones paused for a moment before the next audition. “I love her so much,” she said. “She has that energy.” But she thought Vayntrub was better for the role of Tina, Stewart’s love interest, and arranged for her to come back and read for that part.

The competition for Tina was already fierce. Earlier in the week, Jones had brought in a Korean-American actress named Susan Park, whom she noticed in a small part in the recent television version of “Fargo.” Park was born in Los Angeles to Korean immigrants. Her parents were supportive but doubtful of her career choice until her mother watched her in “Fargo.” Jones was eager for inside news about the show.

“So they’re going to do a second season with a totally different cast?” she asked. “That’s so interesting.”

In the scene that Park was reading, Stewart tells Tina to chart a course into a new galaxy. Park played it spacey at first—she skipped a navigation class, she said, because the professor was a creep. Then she recalled that her boyfriend, Ted, had called the professor Commander Grabber, and she slowly dissolved into tears at how much she missed Ted. After a pause, Park spoke again, with mock gravity: “Hold on, something’s not right. Ted’s not my boyfriend.” Her chin began to quiver, then she blurted, “He’s my fiancé.” Her face took on a dreamy aspect. “I love that word.”

Jones had Park do another scene. Auditions require an actor to switch moods far faster than is called for during actual filming. In the second scene, Park played Tina as a smart-ass; in one exchange, she asks permission to wear a sweatshirt so that the male crewmen won’t gawk at her. Karen, Stewart’s sister, replies that she has no sweatshirts. Park looked incredulous: “So you don’t have any ratty old condiment-stained sweatshirts? This is stunning to me.” Park shouted, with a head wag, “I know you go baggy. Don’t act like you don’t.”

Jones laughed—she seemed genuinely entertained. Park said goodbye. Jones popped a piece of chocolate from the waiting room into her mouth.

“Susan Park just gets it,” she said. “I’ve never seen someone play it so quiet and then be so fun. Actors think they have to play it big. Quiet works, too.”

Jones worked on “Other Space” for a month; at the time, she was also casting the fourth season of “Veep,” with Julia Louis-Dreyfus. After a month, Jones had whittled a list of hundreds of actors down to fewer than two dozen. Jessie Henderson, Feig’s producing partner, and Owen Ellickson, the showrunner of “Other Space,” had begun watching during the middle rounds, and Feig sat in on the finals. Feig is gangly and tall, with boxy glasses; he arrived on a weekday afternoon in an English tailored suit with a Ralph Lauren tie and a pocket square. “The secret of life in the big city is wear a suit, because you can take a shit anywhere,” he said. “Folks are, like, ‘Hello, sir, welcome back!’ ”

Extra chairs were brought into the audition room. Feig clicked off his phone and looked at Jones.

“O.K., Jonesie, show me what you’ve got.”

One of the first actors to see Feig was Karan Soni, a young Indian-American actor whom Jones had met through another of her finds, Aubrey Plaza, a star of “Parks and Recreation.” Soni was from New Delhi; in his first attempt at acting, at the international prep school he attended, the instructor screamed at him that his robotic line reading in Molière’s “Tartuffe” was ruining it for everybody. Soni moved to Los Angeles and graduated from the University of Southern California. He had played a regular on “Betas,” a quickly cancelled Amazon show, and a large role in “Safety Not Guaranteed,” an indie film.

Soni walked into the audition room wearing a button-down shirt. There were a lot of lines; to put him at ease, Feig told him that he could use his script.

“No, I can never feel comfortable,” Soni said. “It’s not a good thing. Always better to be terrified.”

He read with Ben Harris, who was punchy from having recited the same lines so many times. At one point, Soni, as Stewart, gets on the intercom and tells the crew members to “holla if you hear me.”

Harris, noting that the show is set in the twenty-second century, improvised his own line: “Really? Holla? That line is, like, a hundred and fifty years old.”

Soni played along: “They’re into the past—it’s a whole movement. Hipsters never die. . . . Did you see the new iPhone 26? Apple does it again!”

“That’s hilarious,” Feig said.

He had Soni do three scenes with different shadings. “See what his interpretation is when he’s being super cool and smooth,” Feig said at one point.

Soni complied. He told a crew member about his crush on Tina and took the scripted line “The vibe between me and her is getting intense” and added, “I don’t usually sweat, but I sweat around her. She’s giving off the heat.” The crew member tires of his monologue; Soni riffed an apology: “What’s up with you? Have you been tanning? You look good.”

As Soni left, Feig shook his hand and told him that he was fantastic. A few seconds later, everyone exploded with laughter.

Feig got up to take a break and gave Jones a thumbs-up on the way out.

“Good find, Jones.”

Some casting directors have been known to curse a director for not following a suggestion. Jones is less direct. “She doesn’t do it in a confrontational way,” Greg Daniels, who developed “The Office” and co-created “Parks and Recreation,” told me. “She does it with a lot of blinks and facial expressions.” Jones pushes actors for shows even if the part starts out small. Until Chris Pratt met with Jones, he was known only as eye candy on teen shows like “Everwood” and “The O.C.,” but in a meeting Jones saw an untapped comic side. She took him to Daniels for “Parks and Recreation.”

“He was so good in the audition we had to rethink everything,” Daniels said. “The character”—the layabout Andy Dwyer—“was meant to be a complete asshole who was only around for a few episodes, so we had to rewrite all season long to take advantage of him.”

Jones can be sneaky. She had long been a fan of the Chicago actor Nick Offerman and was impressed with his progress as a comedian. She brought him into the “Parks and Recreation” casting process early, but the producers were undecided. Jones waited a few weeks, then remarked, “Your instincts about Nick Offerman were good. Let’s bring him back.” The producers agreed, and Offerman went on to become the government-hating bureaucrat Ron Swanson, an anchor of the show.

“They forget that shit, they see so many people,” Jones said. “I do that all the time.”

Jones doesn’t share in a film’s profits; instead, she receives a flat fee of up to ninety thousand dollars. She cast “The Office” pilot for forty thousand dollars, and received a fraction of that for each episode, but receives nothing from reruns or digital sales of any of her shows. In the past, she has offered to take no money up front and just a tiny percentage of profit if a show does well, but producers have never taken her up on the deal. She noted that there’s still no Academy Award for casting. “Believe me, it’s sad for me that I have to still get a J. Crew shirt instead of a shirt from Barneys when I know that Jonah Hill is worth millions of dollars,” she said. “It’s not a bitter thing, but it’s just, like, ‘Ah shit, I’m doing something wrong.’ ”

After six weeks and several hundred auditions, it was time for Jones and Feig to finalize the cast for “Other Space.” The male leads began to settle into place. Soni was set for Stewart, and Eugene Cordero, a Filipino sketch comedian, for Michael, Stewart’s boyhood friend and downtrodden third-in-command. Neil Casey, a former “S.N.L.” writer, won the part of Kent, who has awakened from a deep saline bath, where he was kept in order to provide organs for his brother.

Narrowing down the three women was a bigger challenge—an indication, Jones said, of how much the opportunities for women comics have improved in the past decade. “There have always been funny women—I mean truly funny, not fake funny. But now they are sought after, written for, and valued, not just as sidekicks or wise-cracking receptionists. Joan Rivers, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Melissa McCarthy are now truly culturally important.”

Feig came back for a second day. Jones was pushing Vayntrub and Park for the parts of both Karen and Tina. But Park had just been cast in a Fox medical drama that was filming in Atlanta, “Red Band Society,” as the mother of a boy in a coma. Her taped auditions with Jones would have to suffice.

Vayntrub was called back so that Feig could have her read again for Karen and for the third female part, Natasha, the ship’s bombshell and operating system. (Natasha worked previously on the Hooters casino space shuttle.) For the latter role, Vayntrub shook out her hair and wore a more revealing dress. She ably delivered a series of lines in which Natasha coyly begs for free will, but she didn’t seem quite right for the part. She exited, and Feig looked confused.

“I thought she was going to read for Tina,” he said to Jones.

Jones’s face reddened and she shot an e-mail to Vayntrub’s agent. The next day, Vayntrub came back, a mock pout on her face. Her hair was swept to the side, and her dress was a compromise between her uptight Karen look and the sultriness of Natasha. In the scene, Tina is being thrown a girls’-night-out party to help her get over her missing boyfriend, but she is uninterested. Vayntrub’s Tina perks up at the possibility of giving Karen a makeover, and then pauses.

“Her face is so lopsided. I can’t make her face my problem.”

Feig laughed but asked Vayntrub to be more subtle. “Try the first scene, and make her stronger,” he said. “She tries to cover up her disdain and sadness. She’s trying to be strong but clearly is not.”

Vayntrub nodded and tried again, improvising: “When I’m around you guys, I often feel very lonely. I’m bored. Things that interest you make me want to nap. I feel allergic to you guys.”

Feig appeared to love the bit. As Vayntrub left the room, he gave her a wink. Initially, the casting of Soni had raised the question of whether Karen should resemble her brother, Stewart, but that concern had been put aside. “The show is set in the twenty-second century; it can be explained,” Jones said. “Let’s just go for the funniest people.”

Another dozen or so women auditioned. Feig was enchanted by a woman named Conor Leslie. “She’s really good, and beautiful,” he said to Jones. By two-thirty, he was done. He, Ellickson, and Jones adjourned to another room to deliberate, and a few minutes later he said that he’d settled on the finalists: “Neil Casey for Kent. Maybe we’ll have Milana read with some people. Conor Leslie is literally good for any role. Karan Soni . . .”

Jones chimed in, “And Susan Park!”

Feig wrote down the name.

That Saturday, Feig e-mailed Ellickson and Jones with his choices: Soni as Stewart, Cordero as Michael, and Casey as Kent; Leslie as Karen, Vayntrub as Natasha, and a latecomer named Katherine Cunningham as Tina. Jones and Ellickson felt that Leslie would be hard to buy as the put-upon sister and persuaded Feig to switch her for Natasha and Vayntrub for Tina. Cunningham seemed too classically beautiful for the Karen role, so Feig switched to Rosa Salazar, a close friend of Vayntrub’s. Jones pressed for Susan Park as Tina, but Feig was unpersuaded.

“I just thought the way she underplayed Tina—she had this kind of weird delivery,” Feig told me later. “It was hysterical, but it just wasn’t quite the dynamic we needed for the Tina character, and it wasn’t quite right for the Natasha character. For this project, she fell kind of in the cracks.”

Jones said, “You never get everybody. Paul will bring her back for a three-minute bit in his next movie. I’ll make sure.”

All that was left was to make the deals. Usually, this fell to network lawyers, but, because this was one of Yahoo’s first ventures into original programming, Jones was involved in the negotiating. At first, Yahoo budgeted ten thousand dollars per actor per episode for eight episodes, and added a clause prohibiting them from auditioning for other pilots until after Yahoo had decided whether to renew “Other Space” for a second season. “I told them they’re going to end up with community players from Long Beach at that rate,” Jones said.

Eventually, the rate went up to between twenty thousand and thirty thousand dollars per episode for the main actors. Salazar had signed a movie deal with a studio, so Jones brought in Bess Rous, another of her favorites, for the role of Karen. Finally, the calls went out. When Vayntrub got the news, she was on a callback for a network comedy. She had been asked to return to audition for the producers. “They said, ‘For this callback, they really want you, they love what you did. They just want you to be sexier, dress a little sexier.’ I didn’t listen to that and wore exactly what I wore to the first audition. So I go, and it’s twelve men,” Vayntrub said. She joked, “And I was, like, no wonder you shits wanted me to wear a short skirt while I stand here in front of you.”

Susan Park didn’t get a call, but when I told her that she’d been a finalist her eyes widened. “Just to know they think I’m good is amazing,” she said. “I mean, Allison Jones thinks I’m good. That means everything.”

On the Saturday after the casting for “Other Space” had been finalized, Jones was back at work, auditioning a long line of six- and seven-year-old girls for “Daddy’s Home,” an upcoming film with Will Ferrell. The day was hot, and the office air-conditioning was broken. For hours, the shiny, sweaty kids sat in grownup chairs, legs dangling, and delivered the same line: “I think it’s cute that he’s crying like a little bitch.”

Between girls, Jones made notes. “You can tell the ones who have been coached by their parents,” she said. “They’re the ones making the dramatic gestures and moving out of the frame.”

Some of the girls looked terrified. To ease the tension, Jones began asking them what they planned to be for Halloween. “I’m going as Corpse Bride,” one said. “I’m a big fan of Tim Burton.”

Toward the end of the session, a set of twins came in and gave charming but stilted readings. Jones thought she recognized their last name.

“Is your dad an actor?” she asked.

“We don’t have a dad,” the first girl said.

“Our mom married one, but then he decided to leave ’cause he thought Mom was being mean to him,” the other said.

“But he was yelling at her,” the first said.

“Oh . . .”

“Then he went to jail,” the second girl said.

Jones said, “But you know what? You guys did great!” After they’d left, she sighed. “Jesus, I didn’t see that coming.” ♦