20 Recent Casting Choices NOBODY Expected
These wild casting announcements caught everyone off-guard.
Casting is perhaps the single most underappreciated discipline in the filmmaking process, because what is a script, a director, or all the amazing audio-visual technology in the world without great actors doing their finest work?
Casting is far more of an art than many people think, perhaps best evidenced by the Academy finally introducing a new, long-overdue Oscar for Best Casting next year.
If casting directors get the right actor for the part, they can elevate a movie into the stratosphere, but if they get it wrong, it can sink an otherwise extremely promising project.
And then there are those casting choices which came totally out of nowhere, enough that just about nobody could've possibly predicted them.
They might seem odd or even bad on paper, but as Hollywood has proven time and time again over the years, actors are always capable of surprising us with their unexpected versatility.
And hopefully that'll be the case with these 20 left-field casting picks that no one saw coming. Some are certainly inspired in theory, while others are puzzling enough that the jury will remain out until the final film releases.
As ever, we'll just have to wait and see...
20. Eddie Murphy - The Pink Panther
Eddie Murphy hasn't exactly been keeping himself super-busy in recent years, largely sticking to his bread-and-butter franchises with sequels to Coming to America, Beverly Hills Cop, and Shrek.
But the legendary funnyman dropped quite the bombshell recently when he revealed that he will be playing Inspector Clouseau in a new Pink Panther movie.
Wait, what?
Though Murphy's comedic chops are absolutely undeniable and he certainly has experience playing a police detective of dubious competence, it's tough to picture this one.
Sure, Murphy can probably do an intentionally awful French accent with the best of them, but playing a part that was made so iconic by Peter Sellers, and then reinterpreted with middling results by Steve Martin more recently, Murphy's comedic style seems like a totally different vibe.
We don't know many other details about the new Pink Panther yet, other than Murphy hinting that he may have Haitian origins, but it'll certainly be interesting to see his rendition of such an iconic character.