In 2019, a new Batman movie was announced. With a new Batman comes a new possibility for casting; whoever could it be? The internet waited for the announcement of who could possibly play the Caped Crusader in this new theatrical outing. Then Robert Pattinson was announced.
¨I think immediately all the Batman fanboys were rioting in the streets getting all angry about the Twilight guy being cast as Batman,¨ junior Joshua Labell said. Though LaBelle remembers the reaction to it being mostly negative, he was hopeful for the new take.
With every movie comes its collection of performers. Productions rely upon individuals to bring characters to life so audiences can be thoroughly entertained by the substance of what they’re watching. So when it comes to the factor of casting, it can be a tricky business: sometimes it can be a golden globe of production or it can cause the production to crumple to its foundations.
Drama teacher Cate Caffarella stated that an actor needs to bring their character to life in the story that is being told to accomplish their purpose in that production. The basis of that story is the thing an actor should form on. With her time as an actress and getting her chance behind the curtain back in high school, Caffarella has had a lot of experience up on stage working with performers and having experience when it comes to casting.
¨One thing that’s very interesting about casting in my experience is that it’s never something that boils down to just purely ability or talent,¨ Caffarella said. ¨It always has to do with dynamic and chemistry within the cast.”
Image is also heavily involved in the business as well; dirt is not so easily washed off when you are in the public eye.
¨Reputation is a big thing when it comes to actors, especially because [unlike] sports players if they’re good at the sport, they might be able to get away with it,” sophomore drama student Adam Keeling said, “but actors, if they get dirt on their name, it sticks with them.¨
English teacher Margie Graves has strong feelings about the 2021 adaptation of the novel Dune. ¨If it’s going to be a big movie, it needs to be someone who’s good enough that you want to remember their name,¨ Graves said. She stated that a lack of reputation is what kept her from even remembering the main actor of the movie and that a larger name would have worked better for the lead role to help the epic flow more efficiently. Graves gave another example with the adaptation of Eragon, saying that the actor for the main role was forgettable, someone Graves had never even heard of and assumed no one else had heard of either.
Actors usually have to fit the mold of their characters, which might require a simple accent, or have a certain talent, Tom Holland and his acrobatics abilities which fit the role of spider man for instance, but what if the character requires physical appearance as well to be spot on? Harry Potter’s eye color was depicted as blue in the movies but green in the books. Did that change the story?
Jack Reacher was a movie from 2012 which cast Tom Cruise in the main role. The late 90s novel series it was based on made out the protagonist to be at a six-foot stature at 200 pounds, with Cruise not really fitting that description. Laura Beck, director of the Corvallis High school theater program, drew the conclusion that his casting might have been a result of him financing the film. ¨He’s a fine actor, but I don’t think he was proper casting for that character,¨. she stated.
Beck deals with casting all the time since her job requires her to pick and choose people for theater productions. She said that a few years ago she was asked to direct a production of West Side Story in order to bring attention to what was the current spiraling hurricane in Puerto Rico and the plight of the people being affected. With the Shark family being Puerto Rican, there was a search for actors of similar ethnicities. ¨We had no actors of Puerto Rican descent. I had a few actors of Hispanic descent and of African descent. I had a few actors of Asian descent, but mostly I had Caucasian actors. So we did our very best to have actors who were portraying Puerto Rican characters to do honor to the culture of the society. And we received quite a bit of backlash because we didn’t have Puerto Rican actors playing the Puerto Rican characters.¨
Unlike theater productions, movies can bring people to life through computers. A CGI actor can be fine-tuned and changed in any way, so there’s no need to really search if you just need to press a few keys to generate a mold of code that can look however the production wants them to look.
2001 presented the world with Final Fantasy: The Spirit Within, a fully CGI, photo-realistic movie based on the video games of the same name. Core character Aki Ross was promoted during the time as being a virtual actor, trying to be promoted as being the same as any flesh and blood one which could show up in other movies. She also starred in magazines and was praised for being a replacement for real actors underlined in the 2001 article by the New York times ¨̈Movie Stars Fear Inroads By Upstart Digital Actors.¨
The Call of the Wild movie tried to use a similar technique with bringing the main character Buck to life through CGI. ¨Why couldn’t they use a real dog?¨ Graves wonders. She stated that the adaptation and the movie as a whole fell short in her eyes. She thought it lacked something because when it came to CGI acting of any kind, Graves said it was missing components that normal actors brought such as craft and art in a performance.
¨Well, I think that a really good performance will tell the story for the audience,” Beck said. “So they will see things in the character that they would not have seen had they simply read the piece. If the performance is subpar, I think that they will see more of the inadequacies of the production itself and maybe won’t leave with further understanding of the play, so distracted by the subpar performance.¨
¨I pretty much reverted back to the stories of Michael Keane, Michael Keaton being cast as Batman and people saying it was bad and then give a good performance.,¨ LaBelle stated. He also elaborated, stating that Keaton was a comedic actor before taking on the cowl, known for Night Shift and when he was announced as Batman, just like Pattinson people didn’t have high hopes for his performance. LaBelle spent a weekend watching the new movie four times over with friends. With him saying that he was not disappointed by 21st century’s newest dark night.