Given that it launched the film careers of the then little known Rosanna Arquette, the entirely unknown Aidan Quinn and some singer called Madonna, 1985’s Desperately Seeking Susan still stakes a good claim to be one of the canniest casting jobs of all time. And that’s before you get to the then even less known supporting actors: Laurie Metcalf as Arquette’s tacky sister-in-law! John Turturro as the cheesy club MC! John Lurie barely visible as a saxophone-playing neighbour! Giancarlo Esposito in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it role as a street salesman!
It’s an astonishing roll call of future talent from when they were still young and hungry in Manhattan. And that’s because Desperately Seeking Susan isn’t only set in a time when there were at least as many artists as rats living in New York City, it was a product of that time, too. “The city was falling apart and downtown there were aspiring artists because rent was so cheap. So I wanted to populate the film with people who were authentic to that time. I didn’t care whether someone in Kansas would recognise them, but New Yorkers would know they were New Yorkers,” Susan Seidelman, the film’s director, tells me by video chat from her home in the New Jersey countryside, to which she and her husband recently moved after several decades in downtown New York. (“The area had changed,” she explains with the jadedness of a true New Yorker, albeit one now in New Jersey.)
