Films that should have had someone else in the lead role

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I've got The Beach on in the background, and having read the book before it came out I was never convinced by Leonardo Di Caprio as Richard. I seem to remember Danny Boyle wanted the part to go to Ewan McGregor, who I think would have been much better. But it was felt LDC was a bigger actor who would have made the film more successful. It made me wonder about other films which would have been different if another actor was the lead role. Anyone got any examples?

36 year old Emma Thompson playing 19 year old Elinor Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility., bloody stupid.

Kate Winslet was perfectly cast as Marianne.

Tom Cruise as Jack Reacher. Wtaf.

The Dark Tower. Roland should have been a grizzly Clint Eastwood type, NOT Idris! And anyway, the film was rubbish - they could never capture the magic of the series of books in one movie.

Someone may have said already but sense and sensibility. Hugh Grant and Emma Thompson both wrong. Greg Wise excellent. Kate Winslet good. Alan Rickman great EXCEPT way to old for KW

I came on to say Anne Hathaway as Emma in One Day too, but agree with Alan Rickman being too old for Kate Winslet. So wrong, I was a teenager when I first watched that film and thought he was creepy. Great actor but not in that part! I don’t remember thinking Emma Thompson was too old to play the elder sister. Admittedly she was no way 19 but I thought she was great in the part.

Audrey Hepburn thought so too. Apparently she refused to take the role because it should be Julie. But she was told that Julie would never be cast because she wasn’t a big enough name, and that if Audrey didn’t do it it would be given to someone else. So she took it, and Julie Andrews did Mary Poppin and got the Oscar. The first person she thanked in her Oscar speech was Jack Warner for refusing to cast her in MFL, and hence freeing her for MP.

Ben Platt in Dear Evan Hanson, DH kept wondering why the 30 something gardener kept hanging around with the highschool students. (Or moping because they didn't want to)

Katherine Hepburn as Eleanor of Aquitaine in The Lionin Winter. God, no.

Richard Harris as Cromwell. So they allegedly stuck warts on him, big deal!

Julie Andrews looked far too old to be a novice nun in Sound of Music no matter how well she can sing.
Daniel Craig, worst Bond ever, more of a squaddie thug than an aristocratic Scottish naval commander.
Agree about Andie MacDowell, ruined an otherwise perfect cast

I get the feeling Liam Neeson would have been perfect, but a lot of his films are a but samey, so maybe not. Definitely not Tom Cruise though.

Now there's an idea I could get on board with!

Colonel Brandon was quite a bit older, about 35 I think, to Marianne's, what, 17? So although the gap between AR and KW was even more than that I'm not sure it was way out of whack with Austen's intentions.

Emma Watson as Hermione Granger was a terrible choice imo. She's wooden and very stage schooly. I actually don't like the actress in real life but she was very different from the book version.

Yes, Watson was a terrible choice. Pretty kid who couldn't act to play Hermione????

She did write that bloody amazing script though, so she's allowed
I always had Dolph Lundgren in my head for Reacher, but he's way too old now.

But AR was about 50 when he played the role

I think that because ET had to play Elinor otherwise the film wouldn’t have got made, it made sense to age up Brandon by a bit, not to make her look very anomalous. (They had to age up Mrs Dashwood, too.)

And I actually think Hugh Grant was well cast, precisely because the film role didn’t make Edmund at all like the novel character — understandably, as Book Edmund was a dull, decent stick whose appeal was mysterious. If they’d cast someone who played him just as JA wrote him, it would have made Elinor’s plot inexplicable compared to Marianne’s with dashing (but evil) Willoughby. So they rewrote him as Hugh Grant, all adorable self-deprecating stammers and cutesy with Margaret (also reinvented for the film as adorable tomboy).

Brandon in the novel was also a rather stodgy older man who wore flannel waistcoats and complained of rheumatism, not Alan Rickman smouldering, and was very much presented as ‘dull, safe choice for Marianne, after she nearly killed herself through self-indulgence.’.

A modern audience isn’t going to necessarily buy the ‘be sensible (in the modern sense), not romantic’ moral, so the casting changed the message.

Ryan ONeill as Barry Lyndon
Rene Zellweger as Bridget Jones
Daniel Craig as Bond
Julia Roberts in Live Laugh Love - way too old
Meryl Streep in Mama Mia - ditto

on the subject of unrealistic and inappropriate age differences,
has anyone seen ‘Sabrina’ it’s an old classic apparently, which
we recently watched, a young, fresh faced Audrey Hepburn
with old, grizzled, grey skinned Humphrey Bogart? shudder

Yes, she really did.
It's one of my favourites and I love the sound track.

Jude Law should have played Grindelwald.

Nooo, Sean Bean was perfect in this.

But bloody awful in James Bond

Who else was considered for the part of Freddie Mercury?
I thought the rest of the band were excellent in their casting.

Maybe the actor who plays Raj in Big Bang Theory?

The irony is that once Sean Bean was cast, Bernard Cornwell himself said that he was ‘the quintessential Sharpe’ and that he hears Sean’s voice when he writes Sharpe. He was also full of praise for Daragh O’Malley. Perfect casting.

Very niche but the Wyoming sheriff drama Longmire has a terribly cast female lead. In the books she's a petite, curvaceous Italian with short curly hair.

In the TV show she's a six foot ice cool blonde with the surname Moretti 😂

I’m still holding a grudge at the actor cast as Ralph in the 1963 film version of Lord of the Flies was slim and dark haired when the the book , the very first line is “The boy with fair hair”. And goes on to state he was like a boxer but mild in his facial expressions