Like creative bookkeeping and grabbing credit, miscasting is a Hollywood tradition as old as the movies themselves.
Think of John Wayne ambling around with cowboy aplomb as Genghis Khan in The Conqueror of 1956. Or Madonna, reinventing herself once too often as a missionary in 1986’s Shanghai Surprise.
Such outrageous cases aside, there’s often a very fine line between miscasting and good, healthy “creative stretching.”
“It’s a matter of taste,” says Amy Hobby, whose company, Double A Films, recently produced Secretary and Thirteen Conversations About One Thing. “I can look at something and say, ‘Oh my God! He’s completely miscast!’ And then maybe someone else thinks it’s OK.”
Still, a tepid box office and bad or mixed reviews may suggest that an actor has gone a bridge too far. Floyd Conner, author of Hollywood’s Most Wanted (Brassey’s Inc.), which contains a chapter on miscasting, attempts a rule of thumb.
“When they’re stretching, they’re just pushing the envelope a little bit, and they’re getting away with it,” he says. “Whereas with miscasting, it seems like they’re either put in a role they don’t belong in and don’t want to be in, or they have thought that their range was more than what it actually is.”
Two recent, very visible cases of possible miscasting involve Jack Nicholson in About Schmidt and Nicole Kidman in The Hours.
Because both performances won Golden Globes, it might appear that the casting was inspired, but this is tricky stuff. Neither film is a blockbuster and reviews of these performances, while generally respectful, have not been universally glowing.
Could Nicholson and Kidman have been honored for rising above bad casting?
ABOUT JACK
Nicholson plays Warren Schmidt, a retired insurance exec who embarks on a journey of self-exploration in a 35-foot Winnebago. As envisioned by director Alexander Payne, Schmidt is a middle-American Everyman with no idea about the meaning of his life.
If a cluelessness expert — someone like Fred Willard from Best in Show, say — had played this man, the film might have turned out more like Payne’s stinging satires, Election and Citizen Ruth. But with Nicholson in the role, something different happened.
“There’s Jack Nicholson playing him,” Payne explains. “That immediately makes him a little out-of-the-ordinary.” Nicholson’s sly expressions and always-alert eyes give Schmidt an air of introspection. He is less the Everyman than the Exceptionalman.
“If you wish to display an unexceptional American, don’t pick Nicholson,” says The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane in his review. “These days, he engulfs movies with his knowingness.”
“To me what’s interesting about the performance is that it constantly evokes a lot of Nicholson’s other films,” says David Schwartz, chief curator of film at New York’s American Museum of the Moving Image. He’s thinking of films such as Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces, films that, unlike About Schmidt, play easily into Nicholson’s gift for introspection.
As a result of Nicholson’s performance in About Schmidt, and because of the baggage he carries, the film changed. According to Payne, it became less of a comedy, in which we’d laugh at his character’s follies, and more of a drama, in which we feel his pain. Picking up the prize for best dramatic actor at the Golden Globes ceremony, Nicholson joked in a most telling way:
“I don’t know whether to be happy or ashamed, because I thought we made a comedy.”
WINNING BY A NOSE
If About Schmidt is a case of an actor who is too deep or too wary for the role as written, Kidman’s work in The Hours may be just the opposite.
The glamorous Kidman, says Hobby, had been known more for being “young and fresh and beautiful” than for “substance.” But in The Hours, she portrays Virginia Woolf, a woman of tremendous substance and an author of unsurpassed sophistication. And just to up the ante, the movie finds Woolf at a time (or times) of her life when she’s wrestling with mighty personal demons.
To tone down Kidman’s glamour, she wears a false nose and dresses like a frump. To Michael Cunningham, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning novel inspired the film, her entire bearing indicates gravitas.
“Not only was her face unrecognizable, but her stance had changed,” offered Cunningham, writing about Kidman’s transformation in The New York Times. “She held her head more sternly; she set her shoulders slightly forward, as if trying to conceal the fact that she expected, at any moment, a blow from behind.”
No one has suggested that Kidman embarrasses herself in the role. But what some people take away from her performance isn’t so much an appreciation of Woolf’s inner turmoil as an admiration for Kidman’s technical stunt of overcoming the limitations of her image.
“We all know how awards voters roll over for beautiful people who uglify themselves for serious roles,” notes critic Todd Anthony in his dismissive review of The Hours in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.
Kidman’s transformation — and especially that nose — is what people tend to talk about when they talk about The Hours. And because it’s obvious that she worked very hard on transforming herself, Hobby says, there’s a tendency to give her extra credit. A more naturally fiery actress — for example, Kidman’s Australian countryman Judy Davis — surely wouldn’t have had to put so much effort into concealment.
“Judy Davis, we know she can do that,” says Hobby. But Kidman, she adds, “surprised people.” Ebert & Roeper’s Richard Roeper puts it another way.
“It does take a while to get past the point of saying, ‘Boy, she really does look different with that prosthetic nose,’ ” says Roeper, whose new book, 10 Sure Signs a Movie Character is Doomed & Other Surprising Movie Lists (Hyperion), deals with casting issues, among others. “Maybe the makeup artist should be getting the award.”
BRAVE NEW MISCASTING
Why does miscasting happen?
Sometimes it’s simply an honest case of bad judgment. In other cases, says Hobby, a big star with a limited range will be miscast because a movie studio or a filmmaker believes that a star will make the film a hit.
“A director can be seduced by a star that might be wrong for the role,” she says. “Reese Witherspoon’s agent was gung-ho for her for Secretary. And we’re like, ‘Y’know, we should do it because more people are going to see our film! If we cast Maggie [Gyllenhaal], it might not get out, it might not get a distributor.’ “
Gyllenhaal did get the role, and she’s been picking up awards ever since.
“Does The Hours get made if they don’t have the name of Nicole Kidman, along with Meryl Streep and Julianne Moore?” Roeper asks, citing Kidman’s co-stars. “I mean, Meryl Streep and Julianne Moore are fantastic actresses, but they don’t have the box-office pull that Nicole Kidman has right now.
“That’s the way it’s always been in Hollywood.”
In many cases, says Schwartz, miscasting of this sort happens because an actor who is known for glamour wants “to be taken seriously” or is thinking about the “longevity of their career” and “building a career that will last” when beauty fades.
“It’s legitimacy within the acting community, with their peers,” Hobby agrees. “Why do Hollywood actors come to New York and do Broadway plays?”
And if the actor’s more serious work is well-received, great. If not, the actor is generally assumed to have been cast beyond his or her depth.
With the dawning of the new millennium, and a growing technological sophistication in movies, a new type of miscasting is now possible. In The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, the pivotal role of the pathetic, power-addled Gollum is played by a digital creation, voiced by and based on a human actor (Andy Serkis).
“I’d rather see someone’s face, personally,” says Hobby. “I don’t understand, conceptually, why they would choose to make it a digital character.”
“The thing about technology, with a lot of filmmakers,” says Roeper, “is because it’s there, they feel compelled to use it.”
Still, many moviegoers were so impressed by the technological feat of Gollum that the issue has hardly been raised.
The movie is a megahit and critical carping has been limited — in fact, a number of critics call the digital performance Oscar-worthy.
As Hobby says, it’s a matter of taste.
