Booking Through Thursday: Dream Cast

Do you ever sit and wonder who could be cast as your favorite characters? (Please feel free to give examples!)

What actors do you think have done particularly excellent jobs with some of your favorite characters?

Honestly, not that much. Sometimes, I will sit down with someone and hash out a casting list (my friend Natalya and I once put together a cast for The Lord of the Rings completely selected from sixties and eighties rock and pop stars; the sixties, obviously, is for The Hobbit), but rarely on my own. I think there’s plenty of room for many actors’ interpretation of a character, so it’s hard for me to think of the choice. I will nod along with great casting choices I find online—such as Jessica Sula as Hermione, or this brilliant genderflipped cast for The Lord of the Rings. (Judi Dench as Gandalf? Oh, my heart!)

A tiny selection of actors doing good work with good characters, then. Lois Maxwell as Moneypenny leaps to mind, but I don’t read the Bond books, so I suppose that doesn’t count. I love her out of her literary context. Ian McKellen is Gandalf, and I obviously adore the cast of The Lord of the Rings as a whole. While I haven’t seen seasons two or three of Game of Thrones, I think Emilia Clarke is doing very good work as Daenerys. While Jude Law is my favorite “classic” Watson, I also adore Lucy Liu’s Joan Watson, as well as Johnny Lee Miller’s Sherlock Holmes.