What movies or TV shows have featured the most bizarre miscasts?
I have to hold out for “The Conquerer”, starring John Wayne as Ghenghis Khan. The sound of John Wayne drawling out the bizarre psuedo-classical dialogue the script saddled him with is almost unbearable. Who exactly thought John Wayne would make a good Ghenghis Khan? Yes, John Wayne could ride a horse. That’s about his only qualification.
Not to mention that the movie was shot on a location that had been used as a nuclear test site, and most of the cast and crew eventually died from cancer.
In Billy Wilder’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, Christopher Lee was cast as Sherlock’s brother Mycroft. I like Lee, but he would have needed to gain about 200 pounds for the role.
By the way, wouldn’t Adrien Brody (who just won the Oscar for The Pianist make a good Sherlock Holmes? Certainly has the nose for it.
Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder are individually both pretty bad in Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula, but I find their scenes together hilarious: it’s like they’ve flown in from California for the day.
I’ve not seen it but Peter Bogdanovich’s film of Henry James’s Daisy Miller starring Cybill Shepard sounds appalling and was widely ridiculed at the time. And pretty much anything featuring Sean Connery as anything other than Scottish or James Bond.
And Kenneth Branagh in just about anything. His Frankenstein was even worse than Sting’s attempt at the role.
Frank Morgan as the Wizard in “The Wizard of Oz”. That role was written for W. C. Fields, and as the character and dialogue stood, anyone but Fields was doomed to fail in it.
I believe that it is physically impossible to be any more miscast than Geena Davis was in Cutthroat Island. Watching this movie is a strange experience; it’s like you’re watching a pirate movie, and somebody has gone and spliced in scenes of Geena Davis from a completely different movie using Forrest Gump technology. You’ve got all these filthy brigands going, “Arrr, arrr,” and smack in the middle of it all is lovably pop-eyed, chirpy Geena Davis from Beetlejuice.
Another pirate movie miscast that springs to mind is the masterfully incongruous Walter Matthau in Pirates, in which he displays not only the oddest “pirate acting” ever, but possibly the oddest performance in the history of acting. Not that this makes it an unenjoyable movie; quite the contrary, it’s a hugely entertaining cheesefest. But don’t watch it back to back with Cutthroat Island, or you could hurt yourself.
Keanu Reeves has been perfectly fine in quite a few movies, but no one’s ever seen his best roles, unfortunately.
My vote is for Barbra Streisand in All Night Long. It’s a nice little comedy, but Barbra plays a mousy little housewife (think George Engle in the “Mary Tyler Moore Show”) and nothing about Barbra is mousy.
Morgon was terrific in the role; Fields would have turned the wizard into a joke and ruined the entire film (and I say this as a big fan of his).
Also for Bruce Willis in that film. However, if they had switched parts, it would have been fine.
An obscure one: Oliver Reed as Patrick Standish in Take A Girl Like You. He’s supposed to be a breezy superificial type of guy, but Reed has this brooding, hidden-depths, thundercloud-browed style of acting that completely undercuts the script. Not that anybody would care I guess
Dennis Hopper as Victor Drazen in the first season of 24.
Yeah, Dennis Hopper can do a passable cookie-cutter psychotic heavy.
Asking him to attempt a Yugoslavian psychotic heavy is just ridiculously beyond the man’s range, though.
Embarrassing to have the character’s sons talking in their native tongues while Daddy interjects in English with a Boris-and-Natasha-quality Eastern-European accent. Ugh.
Secret Storm circa 1970. Joan Crawford, then about 70, fills in for her daughter Christina. Mommie Dearest portrayed a repressed, twenty-eight year old housewife.
