Ann Mulhall reaches into her filing cabinet brimming with 8-by-10s of smiling faces and randomly extracts a photo of a slightly overweight, middle-age man.

He certainly doesn’t have movie star looks, but that’s not what Mulhall is looking for anyway.

“He could do background work,” she says. “Maybe play a state representative or someone in a bar.”

Mulhall picks out another headshot, this one of an attractive 20-something blonde. “She could be a hostess at a restaurant,” Mulhall says after a glance.

There are thousands more photos in five drawers – men, women, children, some plain-looking, some glamorous and all hopeful of being discovered.

Mulhall can play a small role in that process.

She’s the owner of LDI Casting, the area’s only casting agency, the place TV and movie-production companies go when they need people to populate the edges of their stories.

Most days, Mulhall works out of her basement office off Atwells Avenue in Providence, reading scripts, digging through piles of soft-focus portraits and supervising auditions for people of varying degrees of acting talent.

And, with film crews visiting Rhode Island frequently in recent years to take advantage of the state’s special tax credits, she and her two assistants have been busy.

LDI Casting has been retained to find actors to fill roles in the films such as “Underdog,” “27 Dresses,” and “Dan in Real Life.” Most recently, LDI has been involved in casting three seasons of the Showtime TV production of the series “Brotherhood.”

Why LDI? Visiting production companies often have big-enough budgets to hire seasoned actors and actresses from New York and Los Angeles, Mulhall says, but it’s cheaper if they can find locals to fill their needs.

Armed with a database of 7,000 actors and wannabes from Rhode Island to Maine, LDI Casting has proved good at doing just that.

For example, of 42 roles in the Disney production of “Underdog,” 36 of them went to locals, Mulhall says.

Although Mulhall declines to detail LDI’s annual revenues, she does allow that her fees vary widely depending on the job and the production company she is working with.

And, while she works in an industry that pays its top talent handsomely, Mulhall makes it clear she’s not exactly rich. “As long as I have a house and a car, I’m good,” she says.

Mulhall got her start in show business in the 1980s when she performed in local community theaters, then moved to New York City to put on a one-woman act.

It wasn’t quite satisfying for her. “I decided I wanted to do something more than acting, but I didn’t know what,” she says.

When she moved to Los Angeles and found a job as a production assistant at “Mad TV” for two seasons and later at the short-lived talk show “Vibe,” Mulhall experienced a part of the business she never had seen as an actress.

She sat in on auditions and casting discussions, learning what directors were looking for when filling roles. “I said, ‘So this is what they talk about when you leave the audition,’ ” Mulhall said. “You realize that actors worry about things in auditions that don’t even matter.”

She took that knowledge back to Rhode Island in 2001 and, after reacquainting herself with the local theater scene, settled on opening a casting agency. She figured it would be a part-time gig.

Soon, it was much more.

She picked up casting jobs for two independent films, and then commercials for Cardi’s Furniture and Lifespan health network. Early on, those assignments didn’t cover her bills, and she worked part-time as a recreational therapist for Alzheimer’s patients.

“But all those little jobs added up to a lot of experience, and when the big jobs came I was ready for it,” Mulhall says. “I had the knowledge of the casting, the unions, but I [also] had knowledge of the local talent pool.”

Her big break came when the production company filming “Brotherhood” arrived in Providence in 2005 to shoot an entire season’s worth of shows.

Working on casting for “Brotherhood” allowed her to run her business full time, but she wasn’t sure it would last. “I kept thinking that it would peter out, but it never did,” she says.

On a typical project, she reads through a script in advance, making notes about characters and the types of people she envisions filling each role. Then she has an in-depth discussion with the producers and director about what she has in mind for certain characters to ensure she’s on the right track.

From there, it’s a matter of sifting through LDI’s digital database for the right actors, who are called in for casting sessions that are videotaped and forwarded to the director.

In one particularly difficult assignment, the script for action thriller “Hard Luck” with Wesley Snipes in 2006 called for a mother and daughter from India who spoke a certain dialect.

Mulhall said no one in her database matched that description. But in a local store a few days later, she spotted a woman who matched the description. When Mulhall approached, the woman told her that she knew a family with a young child who had recently emigrated from India. The girl ended up appearing in the movie.

The company does have additional revenue streams. LDI has been offering workshops and classes on the proper techniques of on-camera auditioning.

Mulhall is already looking beyond LDI, saying she has plans to open an adult daycare center, pulling from her experience as a therapist with Alzheimer’s patients and her skills as a businesswoman. In the meantime, however, Mulhall says LDI is working on casting for two TV pilots that are preparing to shoot in the area. •