How to get Animation Blueprint refrence for casting

I am trying to animate the finger of a hand, and I need the separate blueprint because the game needs to communicate with hardware over UE4Duino. My problem with using a character blueprint is that I have not been able to access it, presumably because the hand is a SkeletalMeshActor, that is why I have tried adding a blueprint component. My main problem has been with getting an object reference to cast to, but if there is a better way to do it, I am open to that. Thank you for the response!