10 Movie Casting Choices That Were Total Misdirection

5. Jon Bernthal - Wind River

What Everyone Expected

The casting of the brilliant Jon Bernthal in Taylor Sheridan's directorial debut Wind River raised quite a few eyebrows when he didn't appear in any of the movie's marketing.

Between his curious absence in trailers and the fact that he played a murderous creep in the Sheridan-scripted Sicario - not to mention Bernthal's general deference towards playing bad apples - it seemed likely that he'd end up revealed as the movie's shadowy serial killer. If the glove fits, right?

What We Got

In actual fact, Bernthal only appears in the film for a single scene, and he's a good guy. Even more bizarrely, the scene is a flashback which ends with Bernthal's nice guy being beaten to death for attempting to prevent the rape of the film's focal murder victim, Natalie (Kelsey Chow).

Better still, Natalie's actual rapist and murderer is a random nobody called Pete, played by relatively unknown character actor James Jordan.

Hiding Bernthal from audiences definitely helped perpetuate the belief that he'd be the third-act big bad, so this was a majorly clever misdirect, especially for a first-time director.

As brilliant as Bernthal is at playing thoroughly detestable characters, he absolutely nailed this rarest of opportunities to play not merely a decent man but a tragically heroic one.