Wrapping text in  tags
Your code doesn't handle names with spaces within, nor names with characters that are illegal for URL's. To accomodate these two issues, you could use something like:

$item-&gt;casting = 'André, Ann Charlotte, Bob, Kåre Ronny';

$actors = array();

foreach (explode(',', $item-&gt;casting) as $actor) {
    $actor = trim($actor);
    $actors[] = '&lt;a href="'. urlencode($actor) .'"&gt;'. $actor .'&lt;/a&gt;';
}

echo implode(', \n', $actors);


Which would produce the following output:

&lt;a href="Andr%C3%A9"&gt;André&lt;/a&gt;, 
&lt;a href="Ann+Charlotte"&gt;Ann Charlotte&lt;/a&gt;, 
&lt;a href="Bob"&gt;Bob&lt;/a&gt;, 
&lt;a href="K%C3%A5re+Ronny"&gt;Kåre Ronny&lt;/a&gt;


I kind of prefer building the $actors array, as that allows me easily to change output variants. But you could also opt for using echo directly, which would eliminate the need for the entire $actors table. I did however removing the original $actors and included that directly in the foreach, as I try to keep intermediary variables to a minimum.

PS! Depending on font settings and encoding elsewhere, you could consider calling htmlspecialchars() in addition before using in the URL.