Console gives me no errors as both blueprints to and from are characters that exist in the map. yet it always fails to cast.
Both are going to be controlled by the player.
Irrelevant. Get Player Character always returns the character that is currently being possessed by the player controller.
Unless character2 is the player, the cast will always fail. Is character2 the player or is it character1?
Both are going to be controlled by the player.
If your goal is to access either character to set some variables, then if there’s only one character1 and one character2 in the world, you can just use “Get Actor of Class”.