10 Dumbest Miscastings In Recent Movies
Casting Sydney Sweeney as a 16-year-old nerd - what could possibly go wrong?
It's great that an Oscar for Best Casting has finally been introduced, for casting is a vital part of the filmmaking machine. Having actors that fit the characters well goes such a long way towards making a movie credible and authentic, and poorly judged casting choices can heavily undermine or even outright ruin a film altogether.
Just ask these following ten flicks. They all had utterly nonsensical casting decisions that makes one wonder what on earth the casting directors were thinking. It should be said that most (though not all) of these films were underwhelming in most other departments, but fixing these casting errors could've improved the films quite a bit.
The cases vary; some of these actors were too young or too old for their parts, some of them couldn't do the right accent and some of them just didn't have enough range. In fact, these problems overlap in quite a few of the following performances. The one thing they've all got in common? They are so ridiculous it's hard to believe they were ever approved.
Starting out with a strange villainous casting choice from the MCU...
10. Zawe Ashton - The Marvels
The Marvel Cinematic Universe's biggest box office bomb to date wasn't very good overall, with arguably the single-biggest mistake being lead villain Dar-Benn (Zawe Ashton), who is one of the very worst MCU villains of them all. Miscasting played a big part in that.
Ashton is a more-than-capable actor who's given plenty of good performances in other things, yet it's hard to see why she was cast here. Is it just because she happens to be the partner of Loki actor Tom Hiddleston? That seems plausible, as casting an actor best known for her parts in British comedy shows as a supposedly evil, intimidating supervillain was pretty random.
Ashton didn't quite have the physical prowess or sinister screen presence to convince as a wrathful villain, and she seemed totally lost in the role. Again, Ashton is a good actress, and there are many, many other roles in the ever-expanding Marvel Cinematic Universe that she could've excelled in; Dar-Benn wasn't one of them.
There are plenty of other actors of both sexes - Dar-Benn is male in the comics - that could've been cast in this role instead, so such a flagrant miscasting just seems a bit odd. Sadly, that applies to the rest of the casting decisions on this list as well.