Have A Seat On The Casting Couch

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shouldazagged

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No, I have no designs on your tender innocence. Just been thinking about casting roles in movies and television series. I was talking movies with my sister yesterday, and it occurred to me that I couldn't think of a more absolutely perfect job of casting than Raul Julia, Anjelica Huston and Christopher Lloyd as Gomez, Morticia and Fester Addams in "The Addams Family". It was brilliant!

That got me remembering other fine pieces of casting:

Meryl Streep as damn near anybody, but most recently as Margaret Thatcher, Julia Child (that one knocked my socks off), and the tough old nun in "Doubt".

Bogart as Captain Queeg, and as Charlie in "The African Queen".

Heath Ledger as the Joker.

Jamie Foxx, a classically-trained pianist as well as a gifted actor, as Ray Charles--truly uncannily perfect.

Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau, and Herbert Lom as his long-suffering boss.

Dennis Franz as Sipowicz.

Christopher Lloyd again, as the Rev. Jim Ignatowski on "Barney Miller". (Remember the hilarious back-story episode that showed how he first got screwed up on drugs?)

I could go on and on, but what are some of your favorite castings?
 
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I would say pretty much the entire cast of the Mary Tyler Moore Show. To me that was one of the best examples of team comedy ever. Also, Bruce Willis in "The Fifth Element".:cool:
 
Moonman said:
I think you've had tooooooooooo many Mint Juleps!:D:D:D
Click to expand...

(Side note: as a non-native and long-time ex-drinker, I can get away with saying that the mint julep, an incredibly overrated drink, is usually only consumed here at Derby time, to foster the fiction that Louisville is a southern city instead of lower Midwest. The ones sold at Churchill Downs are outrageously overpriced and only marginally fit for human consumption.)

More casting:

Daniel Day-Lewis as Lincoln.

Carroll O'Connor as Archie Bunker.

Philip Seymour Hoffman as Truman Capote, and as the rogue agent Cus in "Charlie Wilson's War". He's like Streep and Day-Lewis, he disappears into any role.

Sharon Gless and Tyne Daley as Cagney and Lacey--I came in late on that show, but came to think it was really excellent.
 
I'll tell you what has put a burr in my Jockeys, the casting of Jane Fonda as Nancy Reagan in an upcoming movie...another movie I will never watch on principle.:mad:
 
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Val Kilmer as John Smith in the movie "Felon." Very weighty role, and I didn't know it was him until I read the credits.
 
If you saw Tom Selleck as Eisenhower in "Countdown To D-Day", he was excellent. And I don't know where the hell they found the guy who played Montgomery, but he looked and sounded eerily like Monty.

Damian Lewis (a Brit!) as Major Dick Winters in "Band Of Brothers". But then I thought all the casting of that one was terrific.
 
Meryl Streep was good as Karen, Baroness von Blixen-Finecke, in, "Out of Africa", but Robert Redford even looked a lot like the real man he played, the Hon. Denys Finch Hatton. Klaus Maria Brandauer was also very plausible as Bror von Blixen-Finecke. The entire cast was quite good, even remarkable. Brandauer was also great as a Bond villain in, "Never Say Never Again."

John Wayne was not only a parody of himself as Genghis Khan; he played a Roman officer in a blibical movie who was simply out of place. He had a very limited range of plausibility and simply should have avoided roles that were clearly beyond him.

The cast of, "Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World" was very good, esp. Challenger, played by Peter McCaulay and Lara Cox as Finn. The role of Marguerite Krux could have been written for Rachel Blakely. And Jennifer O'Dell (the sole American) was excellent as a jungle girl with more of a brain than some, and very action-capable. Cox is very versatile and becomes her character in a variety of roles. I liked her as the hero's wife in, "The Marine 2." Most of her stuff stays in Australian distribution, so we don't see her much here. I like her normal voice, but she fakes a US accent well.

"Battle of Britain" had a superb cast, all very well suited to their roles, whether British or German.

What really irks me is casting black men in roles that were meant for white men, as when a black played Felix Leiter in, "Live and Let Die", and Jack Crawford is black in TV's new, "Hannibal." Fleming clearly described Leiter as "a straw-haired Texan" in the Bond books, and Harris wrote Crawford as white, and he was in, "The Silence of the Lambs," very capably portrayed by the excellent Scott Glenn. If Hollywood wants black roles, they need to create plausible characters for those roles, not change roles to accomodate the wrong actors. This is a casting comment more than a racial one, and I hope it will be read in that sense. There are good black actors. But they're as out of place in the wrong roles as John Wayne was as Khan or a Roman officer. The black guy (Andre Braugher?) who played the submarine captain in the short-lived TV series this past season was very good in that role, and he might just have been believeable. The Navy might have a black sub captain, for all I know. At least, they might have. I think this PC factor is much worse in Hollywood than in foreign TV and movie roles. I'm sure it's a matter of pressure groups and the liberal attitude there, anyway.

BTW, the hot chick who played the Navy Lt. on that sub show was an Australian. It's surprising how many are here, passing as American. I think they can do a US accent better than Americans can do Aussie. Not that I recall an American actor having to pass as Australian...

Did you know that two of the main actors on, "Without a Trace" are Aussies? Anthony LaPaglia sounds just like the Italian New Yorker he played. And the blonde female agent was an Aussie. It wasn't until I saw LaPaglia on Leno that he spoke in his normal voice and mentioned going home to Australia for the holidays that I realized that he wasn't a native New Yorker. I already knew about Poppy Montgomery, though.
 
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a few more....
F Gwynn, J Pesci, Marisa Tomei in My Cousin Vinnie
The cast of The Honeymooners, Andy Griffith Show, M.A.S.H
and Hill Street Blues
D Huffman in the Graduate
Ali McGraw in Love Story
C Eastwood in The outlaw Josie Wales
J Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
 
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