Cast away
Boy, being a casting director is tough. I should know. I’ve just spent a good thirty minutes or so on it.
Yes, it’s that time again. It is now a tradition on this website, whenever I have a new novel released, to come up with a set of actors who will play the main characters in the inevitable movie adaptation. This is what is known in the industry as “the dream cast”—unless the film actually somehow gets made, in which case it would be known simply as “the cast.”
This time around should have been easy. After all, Searching for Cunégonde is the third in a trilogy and several of the characters have appeared in one or both of the previous books, which to remind you, were Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead and Lautaro’s Spear. This means that I have cast the narrator/protagonist Dallas Green twice already. Will any of the actors I selected those two times still work? Let’s see.
Six years ago, when Dallas was an 18-year-old in Max & Carly, I mostly settled on then-former-Disney-child-star-and-then-current-university-student Cole Sprouse. Runners-up were Chandler Riggs of The Walking Dead fame and busy English actor Asa Butterfield, lately of the series Sex Education. Looking over recent images of the latter pair, I have to say, they don’t really work for me as far as incarnating Dallas in his late 20s, let alone at the age of 40. Sorry, guys, nothing personal. That’s just show biz.
In going through this exercise for Lautaro’s Spear—three years ago on this very day, as it happens—I again settled on Sprouse. By this time he was a star of the popular teen series Riverdale and soon to appear in the social-distancing-anticipating disease-themed feature film Five Feet Apart. Other names I bandied about were Cameron Monaghan, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Toby Wallace and Nick Robinson. I’m afraid none of those latter ones have really aged into how I see Dallas at the age of 28, let alone at 40.
Born to play Dallas?
Interestingly, while by no means an exact match for my own mental image of Dallas, Sprouse still actually fits quite well. As of this writing, he actually is 28, Dallas’s age for much of the book. He looks young but also world-weary, which is how the character happens to get described in the book. Is he too young to play Dallas at 40? Probably, but he might be able to pull it off with the right makeup. Besides, people keep telling Dallas he doesn’t seem to age. In addition to being the right age, like Dallas, Sprouse is a photographer and he smokes. He took the photo of himself, which you see on this page, for French Vogue. He’ll have to take that black dye out of his hair, though, and if he isn’t interested in the part, maybe his identical twin actor brother Dylan is.
Valérie, c’est toi?
Three years ago, I identified three actors who might play the woman from Bordeaux who steals our hero’s heart. My first choice was Eva Green, who not only shares a surname with the fictional protagonist but, more impressively, is a former Bond girl and, still more impressively, played a witch in Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows movie. Also mentioned were Fanny Valette and Mélanie Laurent, who certainly have their merits, but I confess Ms. Green still has my heart. Look at the photo of her and tell me that is not exactly how you see Valérie Destandeau.
Devil or Ángel?
A key character to get right in this movie would be Dallas’s good friend Ángel. While I know and accept that any actor should be able to play any role, I took it as a personal challenge to fill this role with a Chilean actor. That actually turned out to be tough since, despite my best efforts, I don’t get to spend a lot of time watching Chilean movies and TV shows. There aren’t a huge number of international stars from Chile, but there are a couple. One is Pedro Pascal, renowned for his roles as Oberyn on Game of Thrones and as the title character in the Disney/Star Wars series The Mandalorian. Another is Santiago Cabrera, who played Lancelot and Aramis, respectively, in the UK series Merlin and The Musketeers, not to mention a roguish ship captain as well as several holograms on Star Trek: Picard. Unfortunately, both of those gentlemen are too old to play Ángel. Instead I bestow the honor on 26-year-old Augustín Silva, who has appeared in his brother Sebastián Silva’s The Maid, Crystal Fairy & the Magical Cactus and 2012 and Magic Magic and Alejandro Fernández Almendras’s Much Ado About Nothing.
As with Ángel, I did not cast the characters of Justin and Amy the last time around, but I shall attempt to do so now. Justin is really tricky, though. He is meant to look like a rock star and then like a movie star. Where would you find an actor who looks like that? The question may sound facetious, but on scanning for thespians who fit the bill (web search tip: googling “young hot male actors” can do some strange things to the algorithm for your subsequent searches) I have discovered that these days hot young actors don’t really look like hot young actors. It’s like everybody has become character actors instead of matinee idols. What happened to the good old days when actors got hired mainly for their looks?
Convincing rock star?
Anyway, the best solution I could come up with was to settle on a rock star who is also an actor and is about the right age. That led me to Nick Jonas, another former Disney star, known for being one of the Jonas Brothers and for being in two Jumanji movies, the war movie Midway and the series Kingdom. Like Sprouse, he is currently 28, which should work even though Justin is meant to be a few years younger than Dallas.
Amy?
As for Amy, a character who barely figured in Lautaro’s Spear but who is fairly significant in Cunégonde, I again found it hard to find an actor who matched my idea of her. In the end my choice was Kaitlyn Dever, who has appeared in the series Justified, Unbelievable, Last Man Standing and who was so winning as one of the leads in the teen comedy flick Booksmart. At 23 she is a bit young to play Amy (who would actually be a couple years older than Justin), but I think she could pull it off.
Donal?
A new character introduced in Cunégonde is the young British tourist Donal, who becomes Dallas’s traveling companion for a while. He’s a bit quirky and funny, so there should be no problem finding young, quirky, funny British actor to play him, right? After all, those types are a dime a dozen in the UK, right? So you might think, but when I went looking for the right chap, every rising young Brit thespian seemed to be brooding, dark and hot. When did the world get so turned around? Anyway, I found one eventually. The lucky geezer is Angus Imrie, the lanky son of actors Celia Imrie and Benjamin Whitrow. You may have spotted him as Merlin in The Kid Who Would Be King or as Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s sister’s creepy stepson on Fleabag or the doomed Prince Arthur on The Spanish Princess or as Bartholomew in Emma.
Okay, I’ve now done my bit. If the actors mentioned in this casting call are serious about their careers, they will be reading this blog regularly and now see that they have been chosen. It is up to them to get in touch with their agents and instruct them to get in touch with me to work out a deal.
If they are good negotiators, they might even get you a sweet three-picture deal for the whole trilogy.
-S.L., 29 October 2020
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