20 Movie Roles That Were Insanely Miscast
These movie roles were sunk by off-key casting.
Perhaps the single most underappreciated discipline in the filmmaking process is casting, because no matter how great a script might be and how incredible the director is, it can all be for nought if the right actors aren't hired for the right roles.
This year the Academy finally introduced a long overdue Oscar for Best Achievement in Casting, because without casting directors lending their expertise to the process, some of your favourite films wouldn't hit nearly as hard as they do.
But Hollywood doesn't always get it right, and sometimes even the most talented of actors can't overcome being cast in a role they were fundamentally ill-fitting for.
And that's absolutely true of these 20 actors, each of whom were cast in roles antithetical to their strengths as a performer and to what they were capable of convincingly pulling off.
In some cases it was merely an unfortunate blip in an otherwise good or even great movie, but in extreme examples the miscasting proved absolutely fatal to the entire project, ensuring it was impossible for most audiences to take any of it seriously...
20. Brendan Fraser - Pressure
New war drama Pressure has received largely warm notices from critics, though from the moment the ensemble cast was first announced there was one major sticking point - bringing Brendan Fraser aboard to play President Eisenhower.
Though Fraser has been enjoying quite the well-earned career resurgence in recent years following his Oscar-winning work in The Whale, this is frankly one of the most shockingly off-key casting decisions for a historical drama in quite some time.
Fraser, talented as he is, simply doesn't look like Eisenhower either in terms of his facial features or his physical build, nor does his voice match up even remotely.
As a result, Fraser's performance never graduates beyond "Brendan Fraser doing an Eisenhower impression," which for a tense dramatic piece that lives and dies on the immersion of the audience, is an absolute deal-breaker.
Thankfully, this is all somewhat offset by Andrew Scott's phenomenal central performance as Scottish meteorologist James Stagg.