Reality TV fans, Jazzy Collins has your dream job. Collins is a reality TV casting director and producer who has worked for some of the most buzzy and beloved shows around, including Love Island, the Bachelor franchise, and The Circle. For her work on The Traitors, she became the first Black person to win the Emmy for Outstanding Reality Casting.
Collins knows what it takes to build a great reality TV cast, and she tells all on the latest episode of the "Nice Talk" podcast, including everything from how the application process works for reality TV hopefuls to the types of questions she asks during auditions. Collins also opens up about something many fans have wondered as reality shows increasingly make headlines for the wrong reasons: How do problematic contestants even make it on to the show?
It’s happened on plenty of shows over the years: Someone is cast, only for it to later emerge that they have anything from offensive past tweets to allegations of violence in their history. Fans are often quick to blame the casting department, but Collins says it’s not that simple.
"I think a lot of people just don't understand what the process is. We are hiring outside vendors to actually conduct these tests. It's not the casting team," Collins tells Marie Claire editor-in-chief Nikki Ogunnaike. "These people are approved by network and approved by the production company."
Additionally, Collins points out that sometimes, the information that comes out about a cast member wasn't available when their casting was confirmed. Instead, people release info online once the cast has been announced publicly.
"Let's just say, Bob from Georgia fills out his background check and does the social media check, and all of that stuff goes through, it's only stuff that is currently public that we have access to," Collins explains. "So when someone screenshots something and saves something to their phone and then releases it after Bob has been on Love Island, there's absolutely no way for us to have access to that information." (Speaking of Love Island, the show has a few recent examples of contestants being cut from the show for past behavior after they were cast.) Collins says that "especially with Gen Z, everyone's on their phones," making scenarios like this even more likely.
Collins also talks about her career as a Black woman in casting—and the disheartening reality she was confronted with when she was starting out.
"Biggest challenge in my career was definitely dealing with a lot of racism," she says. "You know, working on shows I was experiencing it behind the scenes, but also how we cast. It was, like, at that time we didn't want to have any sort of Black woman on that show unless they had straightened hair, they were wearing weaves, they had that European standard, right? Obviously, that has changed so much. But can you imagine sitting there in a room where someone's saying, 'This person with textured hair is ugly because of their hair?' ... So that was something that I was like, Am I cut out for this industry? I don't know if I can do something like this. If I can't even put people on television that look like me, why would I want to subject someone to that?"
Clearly, Collins didn't give in. She was able to find spaces that were more accepting behind the camera and accepting of the people who were cast to be in front of it. "If you can find the right person to work with or the right companies to work with, that's how you succeed," she says. Today, with her impressive career and a production company of her own, she has the power to implement change herself.
For more from Collins—including how she became a casting director in the first place and her hopes for the future of reality TV—check out this week's installment of "Nice Talk." The episode is available everywhere you listen to podcasts.