Some Thoughts on Casting

It doesn’t take much poking around on this blog to realize that one of my favorite pastimes is loving characters and appreciating the actors who play them.  I love watching someone bring a character to life, and from my various actor-specific review series to my write-ups of virtually any movie or TV show, you’re likely to find some glowing opinions of people’s performances.

However, I’ve recently been doing some thinking about acting and casting, and I’ve decided to excise a few phrases from my comments on performances.  Specifically, I want to get away from saying things like “So-and-So is perfect” / “So-and-So is the perfect Such-and-Such” or “no one else could’ve played Such-and-Such.”

Now, I get that we as humans like our hyperbole and that’s just how we talk sometimes – it’s generally not meant to be literal.  As such, it might seem silly to want to wean these particular exaggerations from my review vocabulary, but I’m also someone who likes to think about words and what they convey, and these phrases ignore an important fact of the industry.

Which is this:  “the best person for the role,” at most, means “the best person we saw for the role.”  I can love Jennifer Lawrence’s portrayal of Katniss Everdeen, but I have no idea if she’s “the only one” who could’ve done it because there are a lot of actresses who weren’t allowed to audition.  People don’t get into the room due to race, size, disability, age, appearance, and other factors everyday.  Out actors get skated over because producers doubt their ability to “convincingly” play straight.  Roles are whitewashed and cis actors are cast as trans characters to the tune of “there are no bankable XYZ actors out there!”

Apart from that, there are just good old-fashioned connections.  Sean Astin’s dad did a movie with Peter Jackson, which helped him get in the room for Lord of the Rings.  Lena Dunham cast a number of her friends in Girls.  A ton of directors have “their” actors that they like to cast over and over, like a Hollywood version of seeing the same local actors in eight different community theatre productions – “New Joss Whedon project:  wonder who Amy Acker’s playing this time?”  On the opposite side, we now know that Harvey Weinstein was responsible for getting actresses blackballed in Hollywood if they didn’t give him what he wanted; his connections cut them off from their work.

And on top of all that, there’s fame, plain and simple.  Celebrities can get to a point where they no longer audition for a role, they instead go into “talks” for a role.  Producers and creatives kick around names, theirs comes up, and the meeting starts with visions of box-office draw dancing in people’s heads.  You can’t claim a meritocracy where “they picked the best person for the job” when that person was picked without even having to get in the line.

So, yes.  I can think Tom Holland is an incredible Spider-Man all day long, but I can’t truly say he’s “the perfect” Spider-Man, because there’s no way to know how many “perfect” performances might be out there that never had a chance to get seen.  This in no way diminishes my 100% earnest love for Tom Holland’s performance (bring me End Game yesterday, thanks, Marvel); it just frames it in a lens that’s truer to the facets involved in decisions like this.