Miles Teller and Emma Watson Join Long List of Alternate Hollywood Casts

By Daniel Crooke

If you've been wondering why Damien Chazelle didn’t cast Whiplash star Miles Teller in his TIFF’s People’s Choice Award winner La La Land, it looks like we have our answer: Teller wanted more money. Editorializing on a celebrity’s character is a tricky line to tow so let's just say this is not surprising. Of much more interest is the alternate casting of a different Emma as the female lead, Emma of the Watson variety.

We'll never be able to speak to what Watson and Teller would have done with the roles that are winning Oscar buzz for Ryan Gosling and (frontrunner?) Emma Stone but it does get the mind racing about favorite almost-casts or last minute drop-outs in movie history. There’s your classic Tom Selleck as Indiana Jones or Winona Ryder as Mary Corleone, or more contemporarily you’ve got Will Smith as Django or, uh, Will Smith as Neo. (Follow up question: what made Deadshot so appealing to him that he made it all the way to production?) Alternate cinematic villains give you a dreamy rogue’s gallery of woulda-coulda-shouldas, including The Bening as Catwoman or O.J. Simpson as The Terminator. Above all else, I’d kill to see Warren Beatty play Quentin Tarantino’s Bill. What are some of your favorite alternate casting choices in Hollywood history?

More Early Looks at "Beauty And The Beast"

Chris here with more early looks at next year's live action Beauty and the Beast revamp.

While we've only had the briefest of glimpses at what's in store for Disney's next reimagining/bastardization (potato, potahto) of a favorite, we have already been given enough to incite both excitement and dread. However, what the trailer was missing was any kind of hint of how the characters might visually borrow or differ from the original animated masterpiece. Now it looks like we'll be getting a little of both...

Yep, that's Dan Stevens as the transformed Beast in human form giving a very literal interpretation of the open-chested flowy frock of the original. But the design of Lumiere and Cogsworth (voiced by Ewan McGregor and Ian McKellen) is, shall we say... certainly different - any concerns of reliance on CGI will not be abated by this reveal. Whether the film will take the approach of "more is more" (Cogsworth is walking filigris) or "less is less" (human Beast wasn't so modest, Mr. Stevens) is still to come.

What do you think of the character design? Would you rather see the characters close to the original or an entire new take?

YNMS: Beauty and the Beast

For better or worse, the Disney live action adaptations are here to stay. We bemoan the risk of bastardizing our classics, but it is easy to forget that some of these stories have a long history of screen iterations from their fairy tale roots. Beauty and the Beast has been seen as legendary Cocteau classic and 80s TV cheese before Disney musicalized the legend into its most popular version. Naturally, Disney has another one on deck.

While the quality of these reboot/rehashes has ranged from the unexpected delights (Kenneth Branagh's Cinderella) to the outright nightmares (Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland), the predictably high box office returns of each guarantees that your personal favorite will eventually get the live action treatment if it hasn't already. The just released teaser for Bill Condon's hints at a very literal take on the musical, but is that a good thing or bad? 

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Happy Birthday, Emma Watson!

A happiest of birthdays to former blockbuster youngster and now indie starlet Emma Watson! In one of the most charming bits of movie programming serendipity, her new film Colonia is also being released today.

Colonia debuted at last fall's Toronto Film Festival, and is now in select theatres and on VOD. Set during the factual Chilean military uprising in 1973, the film stars Watson as a young woman going undercover within a cult to rescue her lover (Daniel Brühl) from its terrifying captivity. The film looks to deliver morbid thrills against a political background, with Michael Nyqist's variation on an actual cult leader looking like the stuff of nightmares.

While Watson is still beloved by Harry Potter fans for her long-haul performance as Hermione Granger, her post-franchise work in smaller films has steadily shown new shades to the actress. Her best work yet is her turn in Sofia Coppola's The Bling Ring, giving a smart, measured take on excess-obsessed youth culture that also gives the film a surprising shot of acid wit. More great work followed in The Perks of Being a Wallflower, a performance of subtle emotional maturity that should have earned her the similar praised received by costars Logan Lerman and Ezra Miller.

We missed giving Colonia a YNMS treatment, so check out the trailer after the jump...

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Ellar Coltrane and the Burden of the Iconic Role

Kieran, here. Ellar Coltrane, the boy at the center of Richard Linklater's much heralded Boyhood has landed his next role, a supporting part in The Circle, an adaptation of Dave Eggers' novel about privacy paranoia in the age of social media. Tom Hanks is already attached to star in the thriller, which will be directed by James Ponsoldt (The Spectacular Now). Coltrane will reportedly play Emma Watson's boyfriend who wants to go off the grid, out of the grasp of the eponymous Circle (which is not, repeat NOT Google). That's kind of funny, considering Mason's somewhat self-conscious, adolescent arrogance screed against social media and smart phones in Boyhood. 

The Spectacular Now suggested that Ponsoldt has a gift for pulling great performances from young actors, stretching our imaginations as to what they're capable of. Can he do that again for Ellar Coltrane?

Let me just say that I was an enthusiastic fan of Boyhood and I quite liked Coltrane in it. Er...maybe that's an entirely honest appraisal of my feelings about Coltrane's performance. I thought the movie acquitted itself well while working around a performance with very clear peaks and valleys. Coltrane's doe-eyed befuddlement works really well in certain key moments of the film, as when he witnesses the domestic abuse inflicted on his mother. That same blankness (and the role of Mason does require him to be somewhat blank) tends to fail him in moments when he's expected to communicate a clear persepctive, like the aforementioned scene where he's railing against Facebook. I didn't leave Boyhood with a clear idea of his acting chops in either direction. Boyhood was such a specialized project in conception and execution that it's hard to extrapolate how someone might perform beyond that. (Especially with very little frame of reference. Other than a very brief appearance in Fast Food Nation, Coltrane hasn't appeared in anything else.)

Are you curious to see what we get from Coltrane going forward?

From Quinn Cummings (The Goodbye Girl) and Justin Henry (Kramer vs. Kramer) to more recent examples of Haley Joel Osment (The Sixth Sense) and Dev Patel (Slumdog Millionaire) it's rare that young actors who have their debuts or breakthroughs in heralded projects go on to have careers that match that initial acclaim. One can certainly debate the merits of each (and my opinion ranges from very warm to very cold), but these famous examples all demonstrate that it can be very hard to crawl out from under the weight of a culturally resonant breakthrough performance.