Cast Away: On the (Sometimes) Heated Subject of Casting Adaptations

May 20, 2011

By Kelley Kawano

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All photos ©MGM

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The hottest topic of discussion around here? Casting, easily. (Runner-up probably goes to the serial adventures of James Franco, Gentleman Weirdo.) Everyone’s got an opinion about who should play what character in which adaptation of that book — and we love it. Your enthusiasm (and, um, sometimes anger) got us thinking about our visceral reactions to casting adaptations.

Compared to other literary forms, novels remain more or less constant. Plays call out for regular re-interpretation, so that they exist in perpetual flux. You may have a favorite Hamlet, but consensus for specific performances or staging is rare. Comic book series often undergo revisions, retcons, and reboots. Despite the recent mashup trend, books aren’t generally subject to this kind of re-imagining process, which allows readers the pleasure of generating a narrative’s world themselves. Reading thus becomes a very personal experience. If, as our colleague Christine Spines suggests, beloved authors can almost be romantic objects of our affection, they requite our longstanding love with their work. We develop emotional attachment to these books; their characters, stories, and very words are our intimate friends.

When we learn of a forthcoming adaptation of one of our favorites, it can be deeply unsettling. Like Christine, I have an enduring literary crush on F. Scott Fitzgerald, and when news of the in-development “Gatsby” emerged, friends got in touch with consolation, as if someone close to me had died. And perhaps that’s apt: Any adaptation fixes a single interpretation into permanence, reducing our perfect image — what was fluid and gorgeously vivid in our own minds — to dust.

So it’s no wonder we can get riled up over “wrong” casting for our favorite reads, as your recent battles over the cast of the Hunger Games films prove. And it isn’t just new adaptations that inspire this kind of fervor. Re-interpreted characters — from Sherlock Holmes to Batman — create even more partisan ground, none more so than the granddaddy of all rebooted characters: James Bond. While Sean Connery often wins the Bond-off, Roger Moore has his own camp (pun not intended?), as does Daniel Craig. We’re pretty sure the Lisbeth Salander throw-down, already heated, will hit atomic levels once Rooney Mara’s work in “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” is seen next to Noomi Rapace’s acclaimed performance in the original Swedish adaptation of the Millennium Trilogy.

It is all too rare that an adaptation matches or even surpasses what our minds conjure as we read. But sometimes, if we are very lucky, an actor lines up exactly with a novel’s character, to the point where, by critical mass, they own that role in the popular imagination. Think Vivien Leigh in “Gone with the Wind,” Marilyn Monroe in “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” Mia Farrow in “Rosemary’s Baby,” Malcolm McDowell in “A Clockwork Orange,” Marlon Brando in “The Godfather,” Robert Carlyle in “Trainspotting,” Christian Bale in “American Psycho,” Samantha Morton in “Morvern Callar,” Chloë Moretz in “Kick-Ass.” These are all wonderful instances of an actor merging fully with a character already loved (or feared, in some cases) by audiences. The greatest of all, however, must be Gregory Peck’s iconic role as Atticus Finch in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” a character modeled after author Harper Lee’s father. Of the part, Peck said, “I put everything I had into it — all my feelings and everything I’d learned in forty-six years of living, about family life and fathers and children. And my feelings about racial justice and inequality and opportunity.” Indeed, Lee found the actor’s gracefully understated performance so compelling that she gifted him her deceased father’s pocket watch, noting, “In that film, the man and the part met.”

What are some of your favorite perfect matches between actors and literary characters?  Make the case below.

Tags: A Clockwork Orange, American Psycho, Batman, casting, Chloë Moretz, Christian Bale, Daniel Craig, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Gone With the Wind, Gregory Peck, Hamlet, Harper Lee, James Bond, James Franco, Kick-Ass, Malcolm McDowell, Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando, Mia Farrow, Morvern Callar, Noomi Rapace, Robert Carlyle, Roger Moore, Rooney Mara, Rosemary’s Baby, Samantha Morton, Sean Connery, Sherlock Holmes, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Godfather, The Great Gatsby, The Hunger Games, The Millennium Trilogy, To Kill a Mockingbird, Trainspotting, Vivien Leigh