Sam Shepard as Yeager
Ed Harris as Glenn
Fred Ward as Grissom
Dennis Quaid as Cooper
Kim Stanley as Pancho
Donald Moffat as Lyndon Johnson
Levon Helm as Ridley
Royal Dano as the friend of widows and orphans
and too many others to list, all of them brilliant.
And ianzin asked for movies where the casting posed particular problems. I know of one movie that would have been an absolute disaster without the perfect cast, Airplane! I read somewhere that when Robert Stack first got the script for this movie he thought it was the worst thing he had ever read. And he may have been right, all the jokes would be absolutesly awful on paper. Try to imagine you’ve never seen it, and you read
Nothing.
Without Leslie Nielsen, Peter Graves, Lloyd Bridges, Robert Stack and Barbara Billingsley cashing in their reputations, it would have been wasted film.
The two big winners on my list here are The Princess Bride and The Right Stuff. But I’ll give the nod to The Right Stuff, because it had the harder job of casting seven characters, but they were historical characters we knew. Yet every single actor (wth the exception of Shepard/Yeager) bore a striking resemblence to the original astronaut, and in a couple of cases they are so eerily alike that you could swear they were twins (Alan Spepherd/Scott Glenn, Ed Harris/John Glenn). They even nailed their individual personalities. Brilliant job.
Time After Time (Malcolm McDowell was so good as H.G. Wells).
The Green Mile (can’t read the book without thinking of the excellent movie).
All of Me (How the hell did they get Lily Tomlin into Steve Martin?)
Gabriel Byrne … Dean Keaton
Kevin Spacey … Roger ‘Verbal’ Kint
Stephen Baldwin … Michael McManus
Chazz Palminteri … Dave Kujan
Pete Postlethwaite … Kobayashi
Kevin Pollak … Todd Hockney
Benicio Del Toro … Fred Fenster
Peter O’Toole … T.E. Lawrence
Alec Guinness … Prince Feisal
Anthony Quinn … Auda abu Tayi
Jack Hawkins … General Allenby
Omar Sharif … Sherif Ali Ibn El Kharish
José Ferrer … Turkish Bey
Anthony Quayle … Colonel Harry Brighton
I’d find it difficult to replace any of these with other actors and expect a better performance.
[bold]Harry Potter[/bold] - Rupert Gint as Ron Weasley, Maggie Smith as Prof. McGonnigal, Robbie Coltrane as Hagrid, Alan Rickman as Snape, Richard Harris as Dumbledore…all perfect!
[bold]Lonesome Dove[/bold] (mini-series) - Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones were perfect choices. Both great actors who were swallowed by their characters.
Being a bit of a Billy Wilder fanatic, I find little to fault (cast wise) with many of his films but top of his pile would be “The Apartment”.
Bottom, for me, would be “Kiss Me, Stupid”.
One thing I have noticed over the years is, if I ever catch a film starting that I haven’t heard of and notice that the casting was done by Lynn Stalmaster, then it’s really quite rare that the film will be dreadful, more often actually quite enjoyable…
