Netflix's The Body found its co-captains in Kristina Bogic and Sara Boustany after Quinn Shephard and Gina Gammell widened the search beyond the usual casting channels. The pair were ultimately cast as Anya Butler and Elise Zakaria, and the decision came fast once they read together on Zoom.
That matters because The Body, a coming-of-age thriller from Shephard, depends on the friction and pull between those two characters. Gammell and Shephard were looking widely, including dance schools and TikTok, before Bogic and Boustany surfaced as the match that felt right.
Shephard said chemistry shows up early if you know where to look. “You’d be shocked at how much chemistry you can pick up,” she said, adding that something comes through in an actor’s eyes and you feel it in your gut. For this project, that instinct led the production from open-ended searching to a pair that could carry the series.
Boustany said the process was less neat than it looked from the outside. She read with more than twenty Anyas, and Bogic was one of the first people she tried the scene with. After the audition, casting director Jennifer Venditti called and told her, “They think you’re Elise.” Boustany said she did not immediately get it, because Elise’s quippy, bitchy defense mechanism is not really her, but at the callback she read the same scene again as Elise after first reading it for Anya.
Bogic, meanwhile, said she wanted Anya to feel warmer than the first version the team had in mind. She described Shephard and Gammell’s early read of Anya as quite cold, very poised and precise, and said she wanted to soften her. “I wanted Anya to have that warmth,” Bogic said, adding that the character is someone you could play in many different ways.
The result was the kind of pairing casting teams hope to find but rarely do. Boustany said the chemistry between them felt electric, and Bogic agreed the read was undeniable from the start. That first spark became the basis for a central relationship in a show set around co-captains Anya and Elise, with dance-team history and teenage hierarchy driving the story.
The timing also gives the casting story extra weight. Bogic and Boustany were in Los Angeles for the premiere with their castmates, and Bogic said moving into a Netflix series on this scale has been an adjustment. Still, she said she and Boustany were “really proud” and “here for the ride,” which is about as close as casting stories get to a verdict: the search worked, and the show now has its pair.
