Manage actors and cast them to characters
Actors are people; characters are parts. Keeping them separate is what lets one actor play two roles, and what keeps the cast list useful once shooting starts.
A character is a part in the script. An actor is the person playing it. SceneMatch keeps them as two different things, and that separation earns its keep the first time someone doubles a role, or an actor is recast between drafts.
The actor list
Actors belong to the production and have their own page: a name, a photo, and the physical details the production needs — height and the rest of the measurements departments ask for.
The photo is worth adding. On the day, a name in a list is less useful than a face, particularly for background and day players nobody in the office has met.
Names must be unique within the production — renaming an actor onto a name already in use is rejected rather than creating two entries for the same person.
Casting
Assign an actor to a character from the character's profile. You can pick someone already on the list, or create a new actor while assigning — which is the usual path in practice, because casting is decided one part at a time rather than by building a cast list up front.
Once assigned, the character shows who is playing it, and the actor's details are reachable from the part.
Why not just put the name on the character?
Because the two change independently, and at different times.
- A recast changes the actor while the part stays the same. With them separate, you swap the assignment; everything built on the character — looks, continuity, scene attachments — is untouched.
- Doubling has one actor playing two parts. Two characters, one actor, and each part keeps its own continuity.
- A character merge combines two parts that turned out to be one. The casting comes along with it.
If the actor's name lived on the character, each of those would mean editing continuity records rather than a single assignment.
The thing that is not obvious
Deleting an actor does not delete the characters they play. The parts remain, simply uncast, with all their looks and continuity intact — which is the right behaviour when someone drops out and has to be replaced.
The reverse is not true: deleting a character deletes the part and everything attached to it, whether or not an actor is assigned. If a part is being recast rather than cut, change the assignment; do not delete the character.
Keeping the list honest
The actor list is one of the few parts of a production with no automatic source — nothing extracts it from the script, because scripts do not name actors. It is worth a pass after casting is locked, and again before the shoot, since an out-of-date cast list is the sort of thing nobody notices until a call sheet goes out with the wrong name on it.