Is there a way to simulate upcasting by reference

So, I have something along the lines of these structs:

struct Generic {}
struct Specific : Generic {}

At some point I have the the need to downcast, ie:

Specific s = (Specific) GetGenericData();

This is a problem because I get error messages stating that no user-defined cast was available.

I can change the code to be:

Specific s = (*(Specific *)&GetGenericData())

or using reinterpret_cast, it would be:

Specific s = *reinterpret_cast<Specific *>(&GetGenericData());

But, is there a way to make this cleaner? Perhaps using a macro or template?

I looked at this post C++ covariant templates, and I think it has some similarities, but not sure how to rewrite it for my case. I really don't want to define things as SmartPtr. I would rather keep things as the objects they are.