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Aug. 30th, 2023 09:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tellshannon815Who was the worst-cast actor in a show or movie? (Not necessarily a bad actor - just wrong for the role.).
In the situation I'm thinking of, I'm not sure I can say it's a case of bad casting in the moment, more a case of not knowing how the storyline was going to pan out/writers making it up as they go along without a real plan (something this show is always getting accused of!) The real issue is the age of the character versus the age of the actor.
I am referring to Ethan Rom from Lost.
William Mapother was born in 1965, making him 39 at the time he started filming that role in 2004. At the time when the character first appeared, that was a non-issue - Ethan's age hadn't come up as a plot point in season 1, so I guess if anyone thought about it at all, it would have been assumed that the character was somewhere in that age range. So far, so no big deal. Flashbacks are shown with him in 2004 and 2001, his age still not an issue. Then in season 5, canon confirms his birthdate as July 1977, making him 27 when he dies. So we have an actor who is clearly much older than his character, can't easily pass for 27.
At the time of casting, I honestly don't think it mattered how old the character was; I suspect they hadn't planned at that point to go back to DHARMA era and to have Juliet (who also didn't exist as a character at the time) be present at the birth of someone she had known. And the fact is, there wasn't a prominent Other of the right age for anyone else to have taken that role; Tom, Goodwin, Danny, Colleen, Mikhail, Bea and Richard were all also too old, Karl too young, the circumstances of Alex's birth already known. There were some random Others who didn't appear that much who would have worked in terms of age, but wouldn't have worked in terms of fan reaction - while Juliet, who had known them, might have reacted to the name when Amy said it if such a character had been chosen, to a lot of fans it would have been a case of "Who's So and so again?" So I think the writers were kind of stuck, had to pick *someone* the fans would know, but then found themselves with a character too young for the actor.
On a similar note, something I've been thinking about recently is the issue of child actors ageing. For something like Once Upon a Time, where the seasons spanned several months, the character Henry was ageing at the same rate as the actor, so it was a non issue, but there have been other examples of the actor ageing out of the role.
Avoiding spoilers, but some of you will know who I mean:
Show A: Character was written out by having him escape, did make some appearances where he was shot at odd angles to try and disguise his height, appearance in a flash forward scene.
Show B: Character killed off. It wasn't feasible in this case to have this character move away anywhere. With a clearly confirmed time of characters being stranded and no confirmed time of shooting even without the strike, there was always the likelihood of this actor ageing out of the role. I don't actually think killing the character was always the plan - when the extremely persistent and annoying "Character A from the present is really Character B from the past!" was doing the rounds, the producers admitted they had considered it, then gave a different reason for scrapping it, so I'm not sure they thought of it initially. However, if they had decided to pursue that, there was:
Option C: Recast with a younger actor.
Just curious, what do people think is the best way of handling that issue: to recast, or write out the character?
(I'm seriously already wondering how From will handle this with Ethan Matthews.)
In the situation I'm thinking of, I'm not sure I can say it's a case of bad casting in the moment, more a case of not knowing how the storyline was going to pan out/writers making it up as they go along without a real plan (something this show is always getting accused of!) The real issue is the age of the character versus the age of the actor.
I am referring to Ethan Rom from Lost.
William Mapother was born in 1965, making him 39 at the time he started filming that role in 2004. At the time when the character first appeared, that was a non-issue - Ethan's age hadn't come up as a plot point in season 1, so I guess if anyone thought about it at all, it would have been assumed that the character was somewhere in that age range. So far, so no big deal. Flashbacks are shown with him in 2004 and 2001, his age still not an issue. Then in season 5, canon confirms his birthdate as July 1977, making him 27 when he dies. So we have an actor who is clearly much older than his character, can't easily pass for 27.
At the time of casting, I honestly don't think it mattered how old the character was; I suspect they hadn't planned at that point to go back to DHARMA era and to have Juliet (who also didn't exist as a character at the time) be present at the birth of someone she had known. And the fact is, there wasn't a prominent Other of the right age for anyone else to have taken that role; Tom, Goodwin, Danny, Colleen, Mikhail, Bea and Richard were all also too old, Karl too young, the circumstances of Alex's birth already known. There were some random Others who didn't appear that much who would have worked in terms of age, but wouldn't have worked in terms of fan reaction - while Juliet, who had known them, might have reacted to the name when Amy said it if such a character had been chosen, to a lot of fans it would have been a case of "Who's So and so again?" So I think the writers were kind of stuck, had to pick *someone* the fans would know, but then found themselves with a character too young for the actor.
On a similar note, something I've been thinking about recently is the issue of child actors ageing. For something like Once Upon a Time, where the seasons spanned several months, the character Henry was ageing at the same rate as the actor, so it was a non issue, but there have been other examples of the actor ageing out of the role.
Avoiding spoilers, but some of you will know who I mean:
Show A: Character was written out by having him escape, did make some appearances where he was shot at odd angles to try and disguise his height, appearance in a flash forward scene.
Show B: Character killed off. It wasn't feasible in this case to have this character move away anywhere. With a clearly confirmed time of characters being stranded and no confirmed time of shooting even without the strike, there was always the likelihood of this actor ageing out of the role. I don't actually think killing the character was always the plan - when the extremely persistent and annoying "Character A from the present is really Character B from the past!" was doing the rounds, the producers admitted they had considered it, then gave a different reason for scrapping it, so I'm not sure they thought of it initially. However, if they had decided to pursue that, there was:
Option C: Recast with a younger actor.
Just curious, what do people think is the best way of handling that issue: to recast, or write out the character?
(I'm seriously already wondering how From will handle this with Ethan Matthews.)
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Date: 2023-08-31 10:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-09-01 12:37 am (UTC)