Hypothetical Casting

When someone involved in a fictional project makes a list of actors who would best represent a cast of fictional characters.

The purpose of a hypothetical cast may be to give the reader of a fictional work a better picture of how a character looks and acts. This is common practice for online virtual series and sometimes used by authors of commercially published works. It can also be part of a hypothetical discussion by fans of a work. Many times, when a creator is pitching a work to a production company (such as a new series to a TV network), the creator will use existing photos from previous works to help others visualize the characters (as mentioned below, Jeff Eastin used a photo of Leonardo DiCaprio circa Catch Me If You Can, to help visualize the gentleman rogue con man of White Collar's Neal Caffrey.

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Compare Comic-Book Fantasy Casting, where the appearance of a character in a visual medium is overtly derived from a real celebrity without being an explicit parody of that celebrity; No Celebrities Were Harmed, where a character is a blatant parody or fictionalized version of a real person, and Textual Celebrity Resemblance, where a character's resemblance to a celebrity is mentioned within the work.

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Examples:

• Fan Works

Anime & Manga

• Anime Insider has a regular column that listed whom the editors would like to see in a live-action adaptation of an anime.
• This is a very popular past-time in many anime and voice actor sites in Spanish-speaking countries, partly due of the long voice-acting tradition of those countries.
• Saiyuki - Previous to its animated adaptation Artist Kazuya Minekura (jokingly) suggested that resident Stepford Smiler Cho Hakkai be voiced by Akira Ishida, and so when time came to actually cast him, the animators decided that Ishida was indeed the best candidate for the job.

Comic Books

• Scud the Disposable Assassin always lists the voices of actors that the creator of the comic imagines will be voicing the characters in animation.
• Wizard Magazine has a regular column about what actors should play what roles in comic book movies.
• In-universe example: At one point in The Ultimates, the characters sit around talking about who would play them in the movie of their lives. Naturally, Nick Fury says Samuel L. Jackson (on whom Ultimate Nick Fury was based). Things get awkward (and then very much worse) when Hank Pym starts suggesting Steve Buscemi should play Bruce Banner in the most unintentionally insulting way possible.
• Even before an X-Men movie was announced, Patrick Stewart was the fans' only choice for Charles Xavier.
  • Wizard Magazine once suggested Alan Cumming for Nightcrawler. Guess who played him in X Men 2?
• When discussing who should play Hellboy in a film, Guillermo del Toro and Mike Mignola wrote down their first choice on a napkin. They unaminously picked Ron Perlman.
• The fan favourite choice to play Hal Jordan in Green Lantern was Nathan Fillion, who voiced him in various animated productions.

Films — Live-Action

• During the end credits of Cradle 2 the Grave, two of the comic-relief sidekicks have a conversation about who would play them if somebody made a movie of what just happened.
• In The Player, many of the ideas pitched to Griffin Mill include suggestions about the casting.
• In Get Shorty, Ray Bones said he'd like to be portrayed by Harvey Keitel on-screen. It does happen in the final scene.
• Brazilian magazine Set had a dedicated feature on this, "De Cara Nova" ("A New Face"), which also added a director to the cast and accepted reader input (it served as a contest, often for DVDs of the discussed movie). While mostly it were for remakes - the very first was for Raiders of the Lost Ark, suggesting Brendan Fraser as Indy - there were also Live Action Adaptations - from AKIRA and Justice League to Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, and even a Small Soldiers actioner making the toys life-sized warring factions - and some different ideas - Harry Potter as adults, Batman & Robin done right (only George Clooney remained, and Batgirl was excised), and in Postmodernism, an Office Space-inspired movie based on Set ("well, at least those battles with the printer happen daily here!").
• Discussed Trope in Scream (1996)— Sidney says "with my luck they'd cast Tori Spelling". In the sequel when they have indeed made a Film Within a Film about the events, Sidney is played by...Tori Spelling (who found it Actually Pretty Funny).
• Prior to the announcement of Scarlett Johansson being cast as the Major for the Hollywood adaptation of Ghost in the Shell, a lot of fans wanted Rinko Kikuchi to play the role. Likewise, fans also want Ron Perlman to play as Batou before it was officially announced that Pilou Asbæk would play the role.
• Several Star Trek fans cast Michael Ealy as the reboot's M'Benga.
• One of Sgt. Alvin C. York's conditions for his life story being adapted into Sergeant York was that Gary Cooper play him.
• Joan Crawford was asked who should play her in a film. She picked Faye Dunaway. The result was Mommie Dearest.
• The producers of Taxi Driver were looking for a "Cybill Shepherd" type to play Betsy. When agent Sue Mengers heard this, she reportedly called them and asked why not hire Cybill Shepherd.
• There have been many candidates to play James Bond over the years. To give one example, Clive Owen was a fan-favourite choice to replace Pierce Brosnan. It turned out he was neither offered the part, nor seriously considered.
• Philip Pullman was ecstatic when Nicole Kidman was cast as Marisa Coulter in The Golden Compass, as she had been his personal favorite for the role (he had wanted Jason Isaacs as Lord Azriel, but that role went to Daniel Craig). He even approved the Adaptation Dye-Job - Mrs Coulter was black haired in the book and blonde in the film - by saying "I was wrong. She has to be blonde."
• Bette Davis gave Susan Sarandon her nod to play her in a hypothetical film adaptation of her life. After several projects that never got off the ground, she got her wish in Feud.

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Live-Action TV

• Miranda Cosgrove from iCarly wants Tina Fey to be Carly's Missing Mom.
• In-universe example: In one episode of Castle, the characters talk about what actors they want to be played by in the movie version of Castle's book.
• On Parks and Recreation, the town's mayor, Walter Gunderson, has never appeared onscreen. Amy Poehler says they'd like Bill Murray for the part. Dan Harmon wanted Murray to play Jeff's dad on Community.
• In an episode of 3rd Rock from the Sun:
  Dick: And when they make a movie of this, and they will... I don't want to be played by Woody Harrelson.
• When Jeff Eastin put together a mock-up poster to pitch White Collar to USA, he used a photo of Denis Leary for Peter Burke and Leonardo DiCaprio for Neal Caffrey.
• After having the whole Angel-Buffy-Spike triangle explained to him, Lorne reflects that "I could sell that story to any studio in a heartbeat. I see Depp and Bloom - but then again, I see them a lot."
• Nine out of ten Sherlock fans are desperate to see Catherine Tate as Harriet Watson.
• Russell T. Davies has mentioned envisioning certain actors in his head while creating various characters for Doctor Who. He said that while creating Adelaide Brooke for "The Waters of Mars", he created her with Helen Mirren in mind (the role eventually went to Lindsay Duncan, who does bear a slight similarity to Mirren.) Similarly, for River Song, they considered Kate Winslet for the part (which went to Alex Kingston.)
  • A sketch for the Ninth Doctor's look describes him as "Terrence Stamp if he ran a fruit stall".
  • Romana I was pitched as a Grace Kelly-type Ice Queen.
• When then-Senator Barack Obama appeared on the Tyra show, Tyra asked him who he would like to play him in the inevitable biopic. He initially said his first choice would have been Denzel Washington, but because of the ears, it might need to be Will Smith.
• Many fans of A Song of Ice and Fire have their bets on who to play certain characters in its TV adaptation before it airs. The only popular fan-favorites to make the cast are Peter Dinklage (Tyrion Lannister), Sean Bean (Ned Stark), and Charles Dance (Tywin Lannister).
• The first choice to play the role of The Huntress in Arrow was Lauren Cohan.
• The fan-favorite to play the role of Jay Garrick in The Flash (2014) was John Wesley Shipp, who played the previous live-action Flash. He was cast as The Hero's father instead. He eventually appears as said character, though.
• Supergirl (2015):
  • While Melissa Benoist eventually owned the role of the titular protagonist, her runners-up Claire Holt and Gemma Atkinson were the fan-favorites.
  • The fan-favorite to play her cousin Superman were either Tom Welling in a sort-of Role Reprise from Smallville or Matt Bomer (who was the original choice for the DC Extended Universe to play the character and the voice of the character himself in Superman Unbound).
  • Benoist said in an interview that she wanted co-star and on-screen adoptive sister Chyler Leigh to play their version of Batgirl. Interestingly, Leigh's character has most of Batwoman's defining characterizations such as being a redhead with a bob cut, the show's resident Badass Normal, and eventually even hooking up with the character's canonical Love Interest, Maggie Sawyer.
• While discussing Red Dwarf's failed American pilot, Danny John-Jules named John Belushi as the ideal American to play Lister.
• Cracker creator Jimmy McGovern described the main character Fitz as a John Cassavetes type, "thin and wiry...an ex-military-type". Hilarious in Hindsight, given the eventual casting of Robbie Coltrane. Robert Pastorelli, who played the lead in the American remake, was somewhat on the beefy side as well.
• Phillip Glennister named his choice for an American Gene Hunt as either Harvey Keitel or Nick Nolte. The former was actually cast in Life on Mars (2008).
• In Battlestar Galactica (2003), when the casting agents were asking for "a Mary McDonnell type" for Laura Roslin, and wound up getting Mary McDonnell. Apparently, the same thing happened with Edward James Olmos for Commander Adama. Cooler still, the role was written for Mary McDonnell... they just never imagined they'd actually get her.
• Parodied in The Suite Life of Zack and Cody when multiple people want Britney Spears to play London in a movie about her. London agrees. For the record, she's Asian and Britney of course isn't.

Literature

• In the back of Inkheart, Cornelia Funke mentioned that she always imagined Mo to be a bit like Brendan Fraser, and then the casting went like that for the movie.
• In the back of Dark Fire, Cris D'Lacey made a list of all the actors he imagined playing each of his characters in response to a question.
• This fan-made credit sequence for a hypothetical Good Omens movie.
• In Stephen King's novel The Regulators, after Johnny Marinville and his black neighbor, Brad Josephson have a hard time climbing a fence to escape from monsters, Johnny jokingly suggests that they should make a movie called Black Men Can't Clmb Fences, where Brad would be played by Laurence Fishburne.
• J. K. Rowling had her own ideal cast for Harry Potter long before the first movie was made, and was lucky enough to see several of her choices (Robbie Coltrane as Hagrid, for one, and Maggie Smith as Minerva McGonagall, for another) actually used.
  • Rowling's first choice for Severus Snape was Tim Roth, who turned down the role. It subsequently went to Alan Rickman, who then inverted this trope by gradually overwhelming Rowling's own image of Snape and influencing how she wrote his dialogue (just try not hearing some of Snape's dialogue in the books written after the first film was made in Rickman's voice).
• Stephenie Meyer's choice for Bella Swann was Emily Browning. Meyer also said she pictured Henry Cavill when writing Edward Cullen, but by the time the movies were made, he was considered too old for the role, making it the second part he's lost to Robert Pattinson (the first being Cedric Diggory.)
  • For The Host, she pictured Hilary Swank as Melanie, Matt Damon as Jared, Robert Redford as Jed, Casey Affleck as Ian and Ben Affleck as Kyle.
• In Usenet discussion, Terry Pratchett has suggested Pete Postlethwaite as his conception of Sir Sam Vimes (which then became Comic-Book Fantasy Casting in the children's picture book Where's My Cow?), and James Spader for Havelock Vetinari.
  • He's also reportedly specified "the bad guy from Die Hard" (Alan Rickman) for the role of Vetinari.
• Virtually every fan of Star Trek: New Frontier seems to think that Joe Flanigan would make an ideal Mackenzie Calhoun. Just go look at all the fan-made intro vids on Youtube!
• Lot of Fifty Shades of Grey fans wanted to see Matt Bomer in the role of Christian Grey. A producer said that Matt wasn't straight enough for it causing many outrage.
• Neil Gaiman says that Shadow from American Gods is supposed to look like Dwayne Johnson.
• The author of The Hearts We Sold used a gif of Matt Bomer to represent the Daemon in one blog post. A fan on Twitter also proposed Tom Ellis as a potential alternative, which she approved of.
• Fans of Gone with the Wind immediately envisioned Clark Gable as Rhett Butler, so it was inevitable that he be cast in the film.
• Winston Groom envisioned John Goodman as Forrest Gump.
• Breakfast at Tiffany's: Truman Capote imagined Marilyn Monroe as Holy Golightly. But her acting coach didn't want her playing a call girl, so Audrey Hepburn was cast instead.
• George MacDonald Fraser once talked about casting Daniel Day-Lewis in a proposed Flashman film, though he mentioned his ideal choice as Errol Flynn.
• Axiom's End author Lindsay Ellis has suggested casting Pedro Pascal as Nils if the book ever became a movie. She also agreed with suggestions for Rosa Salazar to play Cora, at least until she realized Salazar's age surpassed that of Cora.

New Media

• The chromatic recasting meme on LiveJournal and Dream Width, in which posters recast parts in TV shows and films with actors of color to prompt conversations about race in the media.
• On deviantART, this is known as a casting call.
• In online RPGs, players often use pictures of real people (actors or otherwise) to represent their characters. This is called a PB, or "played by".
• Amusing things happen when this is done with Harry Potter characters before they are cast for real:
  • Before the third film, Ralph Fiennes was a popular fan casting choice for Lupin. Ironically, Ralph Fiennes went on to play Lord Voldemort, which is about as far away from mild-mannered Professor Lupin as you can get. There are still plenty fans who think Ralph Fiennes would have been a better Lupin than David Thewlis.
  • In this 2006 Fan Vid about Barty Crouch, Jr., Bellatrix Lestrange is represented by footage of Helena Bonham-Carter from Merlin. Carter would go on to play Bellatrix in the actual films.
  • This 2005 Entertainment Weekly article speculates on who should play characters in the then upcoming Potter films. Helena Bonham-Carter is suggested... for the part of Merope Gaunt.
• In-universe within the Whateley Universe, Phase - having just bought out Marvel Comics (in 2007) - ends up in a discussion with his teammates about a possible Iron Man movie and why it wouldn't work because of the casting difficulties.
• Whole groups on Polyvore are dedicated to "dreamcasting" characters, mostly from the Disney Animated Canon.
• Towards the end of At War's End, that guy from that show started working on a cast list for a hypothetical film adaptation and asked his fellow players for actor suggestions. Note that this cast list is largely based on the actors' credentials rather than their appearances, so the casting picks are not intended to give readers a better mental image of characters' appearances.
• The site Mycast is an entire site devoted to this.

Tabletop Games

• The Buffy the Vampire Slayer tabletop RPG makes a lot of hay out of the televised nature of its inspiration; the GM position is called 'The Director', and individual adventures are called 'Episodes' and meant to be part of a larger 'Season'. To top it all off, the rulebook encourages players to identify the actor who would play their character if the game they were in was actually a TV show.

Theater

• In a PBS documentary on the making of The Producers (stage musical) cast album, Nathan Lane jokes with Mel Brooks about who will star in The Movie. Lane says Danny DeVito will be playing Bialystock. Brooks promises that Lane will be in the movie.

Video Games

• The original Castlevania has for the credits a list of well-known horror movie actors "cast" as the bosses of the game.
• An in-universe case in Curses. Examining the demon and angel tells you that if you were to cast a film of your adventures so far, you would hire Donald Sutherland to play the demon and Judi Dench to play the angel.
• When the rumor mill started that Disney would do a live action Knights Ofthe Old Republic tie-in, photomanips abounded of who would be cast for Revan. Top contender? Keanu Reeves. Played with in the case of Kreia from second game, where the discussion on Reddit just cut to the chase and said that the actress who voiced her would be the best fit to reprise it for live action.

Visual Novels

• Hatoful Boyfriend, as a Doujin game, has no voice work, but each love interest's introduction names a voice actor whom the creator would like to play them if it did.

Web Animation

• For Hazbin Hotel and Helluva Boss, Vivienne "Vivziepop" Medrano has a number of "headcanon" voices for characters that haven't spoken yet:
  • Mark Hamill as Vox.
  • Barbra Streisand as Rosie.
  • "Weird Al" Yankovic as Lucifer.

Web Comics

• Legostar Galactica (particularly its wiki) occasionally includes information on who is playing the various (LEGO) characters. One of them is played by Scott Bakula, apparently.
• In this interview, The Adventures of Dr. McNinja creator Chris Hastings said that his casting choices for a Dr. McNinja movie would be Sam Rockwell or Will Arnett as the Doc, Sam Elliott or Hulk Hogan as Dan McNinja, and Anjelica Huston as Mitzi McNinja. The villains would include Willem Dafoe as Ronald McDonald, Jean-Claude Van Damme as Frans Rayner, Phil Fondacaro as Knickerbockers, and Bela Lugosi as Dracula, "The Crow style."
• All the characters in Zelfia, however minor, have "canon" voice actors.
• Electric Wonderland author Peter Paltridge has admitted that he used to imagine Brittany Murphy voicing Aerynn Arlia in an Animated Adaptation.

Web Original

• This is the entire point of the "Casting Couch" episodes on the The Blockbuster Buster
• Scaramouche from the V. C. Andrews fan blog Scaramouche's Attic said that she imagined a young Jennifer Connelly as Heaven Casteel from the Casteel series.
• The Avocado feature Muppet Casting is built around this, recasting famous movies using The Muppets.
• Wattpad allows authors to write their cast list in the corner of each chapter. Amusingly, real person fanfics often have the real person playing themselves.

Western Animation

• The Simpsons has an in-universe example: In response to a remark about who should play Homer in a live-action "Angry Dad" movie, Bart suggests John Goodman, but Homer strangles him and exclaims, "Isn't it obvious?! It should be Gary Oldman!"
• During season 5 of The Venture Bros., [adult swim] encouraged fans to submit their ideas via Twitter and the official message boards for who would play the characters in a hypothetical live action version of the show. As one would expect, the ideas were all over the place, but a few stood out as good fits, including Michael Cera as Dean Venture, Hugh Laurie as Phantom Limb, Edward Norton as the Monarch, and Peter Dinklage as Jonas Jr.
• In many sites, even in This Very Wiki, many fans suggested the hypothetical Japanese voice cast for the dub of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. One of the most interesting voice choices were Mariya Ise as Twilight Sparkle and Arisa Ogasawara as Applejack, partly due both VAs worked in Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt as the titular heroines, and both characters resemble quite a lot like those characters from MLP. Ironically enough, when the proper Japanese dub came out, Ise did work in the dub, but as voicing Scootaloo instead, while Ogasawara did not get any role there.
• The creators of Avatar: The Last Airbender wanted somebody who sounded like Jason Isaacs to play Zhao, as they got the idea for the character from Isaac's character in The Patriot — but the real Jason Isaacs wound up taking the job instead.
• When the miniseries Tin Man aired, the reaction from the Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers fan list to Neal McDonough amounted to "How the hell did Zach Foxx end up in Oz?!"

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