New Actors, Old Roles

When The Dark Knight opens this Friday, the character of Rachel Dawes will appear, but Katie Holmes will not. And in the trailers for the latest Mummy movie, that's clearly not Rachel Weisz tagging alongside Brendan Fraser. The re-casting of raven-haired Rachels is a distraction in both cases, but hardly without precedent. And with the first of these high profile sequels opening this week, the Onion's AV Club and IFC.com both decided to look at other awkward re-castings in film history.

I think the AV Club did a better job of it by focusing on situations where characters with new faces are appearing in the same timeline as their earlier incarnations, so reboots and remakes are given a free pass, but the IFC deserves top marks for remembering Crispin Glover's absence from the Back To The Future sequels.

In the case of The Dark Knight, I'm more than willing to suspend my disbelief because Katie Holmes was horribly miscast in the first film and Maggie Gyllenhaal seems much more at home in Christopher Nolan's version of Gotham City. Holmes is adorable eye candy and she's been excellent in other roles, but she's far too youthful and perky to be convincing as a District Attorney who bravely crusades against murderous crime bosses. Maggie Gyllenhaal, with her off-beat looks and aura of intelligence, should easily fill Katie Holmes' shoes, but not her bra, while making the role her own.

And if the re-casting of Katie Holmes is distracting, imagine how awkward it will be if the studio tries to replace Heath Ledger as the Joker in the next Batman film. I doubt Christopher Nolan would get involved with something like that, but it's just the sort of thing a clueless executive might think up.

Here's hoping that common sense prevails.



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I have very little to say about Maria Bello taking over for Rachel Weisz in the Mummy sequel because I like both actresses but I despised the first film, skipped the second, and have no intention of watching the third. Replacing the writer/director with someone a lot better than Rob Cohen would be the only way to get me to watch another Mummy movie.

You can read the AV Club's article on awkward re-castings here and the IFC take on these matters here. Both are interesting reads for movie buffs.

I can't think of any glaring omissions on either list, but I did find David Hyde Pierce's absence in Hellboy 2 a disappointment. I know it wasn't him under Abe Sapien's makeup in the original, but his distinctive voice brought the character to life in the first film, and Doug Jones gave a comparatively flat performance in the second.

And on a final note, I got a real kick out of this part of the IFC's article:

For unspecified reasons — speculation ranges from script dissatisfaction to loyalty to departing "Silence of the Lambs" director Jonathan Demme — Jodie Foster chose not to reprise her performance as FBI Agent Clarice Starling. Ultimately, the honor of playing Clarice in Ridley Scott's sequel fell to Julianne Moore. Demme went to great lengths to diminish Foster's Starling physically onscreen; in a world of beefy guys, she's always the smallest person in the elevator. Scott and Moore's Starling, on the other hand, is some kind of supercop; blissfully snoozing seconds before she's blowing baddies away. After seeing the performances side by side, it's hard to believe their IMDb pages, which state that at five foot four inches tall, Moore stands just a half an inch above Foster. In, "Hannibal," it's more like half a foot. People joke about the camera adding 10 pounds; I never heard of it adding 10 inches before.

How soon we forget Boogie Nights.