10 movies that cast the right actor in the wrong role
In one of his most recent rants, Quentin Tarantino complained that one of the biggest issues in Hollywood today is miscasting.
It’s easy to dismiss Tarantino as being a grumpy cynic, but he raises an interesting point about the way that actors are attached to scripts; just because an actor wants to be involved in a film doesn’t mean that they are perfect for the leading part. Some great actors just don’t work for certain roles, and it takes a helpful creative crew to make them aware of that fact.
Unfortunately, this becomes a more difficult process when A-listers insist on having major roles, and those with less experience have to settle for whatever they can get. Given that there are only a handful of actors who can sell a project based solely on their name being attached, studios might not feel like they have much choice in how they can cast a film.
What’s most disappointing is when the wrong actor is cast in a film, but one of their co-stars would have been better. Rarely do directors take the time to test out which actors would fit best for their given roles; a recent counterexample is the development of Heat 2, in which Leonardo DiCaprio eventually signed on to play Val Kilmer’s character Chris, despite initially being interested in playing Robert De Niro’s character, Neal, who is set to be portrayed by Stephen Graham.
Mann and Tarantino are two filmmakers who think critically about casting, but that’s not a trait that is shared by many of their contemporaries.
10 instances of the right actor in the wrong role:
John Travolta in ‘Domestic Disturbance’ (Harold Becker, 2001)
John Travolta managed to land one of the biggest comebacks of all time with Pulp Fiction, only to turn into a joke again in 2000 when he starred in Battlefield Earth, and hence, he was desperate to take on a role in the aftermath where he could be a likeable hero.
This led him to sign on for the psychological thriller Domestic Disturbance, in which he plays a divorced man who grows suspicious of the mysterious new husband, played by Vince Vaughn, of his ex-wife, played by Teri Polo, but he is far too weird to make sense as a down-on-his-luck, perfect father who is somehow divorced, and Vaughn would have been much better as the underdog that the audience roots for.
The film would work better if they switched parts, as it would have been interesting to see Travolta play a psychopathic villain.
James Badge Dale in ‘The Lone Ranger’ (Gore Verbinski, 2013)
The Lone Ranger is an underrated gem with far more interesting ambitions than anyone has ever given it credit for, and it has suffered from both being one of the biggest box office bombs ever and starring two despicable leads in Armie Hammer and Johnny Depp.
In the role of Tonto, Disney clearly should have gotten an actual Native American actor to play the part, but there’s an easy solution for who could have played the Lone Ranger himself, which is John Reid, because Hammer could have been replaced by James Badge Dale, who plays his older brother in the film.
Dale has the grittiness and intensity needed to take on a more serious interpretation of the character, and he has proven in films like The Grey, 13 Hours, World War Z, and The Standoff at Sparrow Creek that he is a far more competent action star than Hammer.
Hugh Jackman in ‘Les Misérables’ (Tom Hooper, 2012)
Tom Hooper’s adaptation of Les Misérables failed for a number of reasons, most notable being his decision to have actors sing live on set, which limited the number of setups that he could use to make a dynamic-looking film.
While Hugh Jackman does an adequate job in the role of Jean Valjean, he simply doesn’t have the range needed for Hooper’s style of stagelike intimacy, which required someone with the experience of playing the character onstage.
However, Jackman is such a towering, intimidating presence that he would have been a great choice to play Javert, who Hooper isn’t able to flesh out into as complex a character as he should have been. Jackman would have been perfect to replace Russell Crowe, whose failure to hit any of the notes resulted in one of the most embarrassing films of his career.
Jimmy Fallon in ‘Anything Else’ (Woody Allen, 2003)
Woody Allen has a habit of writing himself a role in his own movies, and once he got too old to play leads, he would try to find different young actors to play his stand-in.
Anything Else saw him identifying Jason Biggs as the Allen-esque New York writer Jerry Falk, but the American Pie star didn’t have the wit, whimsy, or snarkiness needed for the role. Curiously, Allen also cast Jimmy Fallon, who was many years away from his late-night gig, in the role of Jerry’s best friend, Bob.
It’s a forgettable role, but Fallon does a much better job at delivering the Allen dialogue than Biggs did, and likely would have made for a more charismatic protagonist had he been cast as Jerry. While Biggs has no chemistry with Christina Ricci, she sparks with Allen in their few scenes together.
Alison Oliver in ‘Wuthering Heights’ (Emerald Fennell, 2026)
Wuthering Heights earned a lot of backlash for Jacob Elordi’s casting as Heathcliff, who is implied to be a mixed-race character in Emily Brontë’s novel, but there is just as much issue with Margot Robbie being cast to play Catherine Earnshaw, who was too old to play a character who dies when she is a teenager, and she also has too much rigidity and spunk to portray a romantic lead defined as reserved.
The obvious casting choice to play Cathy would have been Alison Oliver, who appears in the film as Isabella Linton, and has much better chemistry with Elordi. While Isabelle is an exaggerated character, it’s easy to imagine Oliver having the emotional capacity to make the role of Cathy both heartbreaking and tragically naive, based on her impressive performance in the HBO drama series Task.
Jake Johnson in ‘The Mummy’ (Alex Kurtzman, 2017)
Tom Cruise has never had a bigger failure than when he tried to kickstart the ‘Dark Universe’ by starring in The Mummy, a film he essentially had to ghost-direct because of the incompetence of director Alex Kurtzman and his obsession with building up an expanded universe of spinoffs.
Even if the script wasn’t terrible, Cruise doesn’t fit the role of a sarcastic, womanising adventure hero, as it’s basically the complete opposite of what makes him great as Ethan Hawke in the Mission: Impossible films.
Strangely enough, Cruise’s sidekick in the film is played by Jake Johnson, who has the same sense of goofy likability that had made Brendan Fraser so great in the last version of The Mummy from 1999. It would have been smarter to get someone like Johnson, who has a background in comedy, to be an unconventional action hero.
Bradley Cooper in ‘Yes Man’ (Peyton Reed, 2008)
Bradley Cooper was in a strange period in his career in 2008 because he was mostly getting thankless parts, as it took The Hangover a year later to turn him into a star. One of his least effective roles is when he plays the best friend in Yes Man to Jim Carrey, who stars as a man challenging himself to agree to anything that is asked of him for a year.
The issue is that this wasn’t new territory for Carrey, who had done the same type of satirical ‘man with an unlucky curse’ premise previously with Liar Liar and Bruce Almighty, but Yes Man would have been a great opportunity for Cooper to step into a leading role where he could show his physical comedy skills, which he would later do in Licorice Pizza and American Hustle.
Jason Clarke in ‘Terminator: Genisys’ (Alan Taylor, 2015)
The Terminator franchise collapsed from the moment that James Cameron decided not to direct any of the sequels following Terminator 2: Judgment Day, resulting in a messy timeline, and Terminator: Genisys being an odd reboot.
Despite bringing back Arnold Schwarzenegger, the film cast new actors in the classic roles, wherein Emilia Clarke played Sarah Connor, Jai Courtney was Kyle Reese, and Jason Clarke appeared as a strangely villainous version of John Connor, who is taken over by the machines, a part so poorly conceived that no actor could have made it work.
However, Jason Clarke shows a soft-spoken, intelligent demeanour that would have made him well-suited to play Reese, which would have been a much better option than Courtney, who is a charisma vacuum, turning the classic character played by Michael Biehn into a complete dolt.
Cary Elwes in ‘Bram Stoker’s Dracula’ (Francis Ford Coppola, 1992)
Francis Ford Coppola got one of the greatest horror performances of all time out of Gary Oldman when he cast him as the titular vampire in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but the film suffered in its reputation because of the awful performance by Keanu Reeves as Jonathan Harker.
Reeves couldn’t do the English accent, and he wasn’t believable as a slick solicitor. Cary Elwes has fun in Bram Stoker’s Dracula in the campy role of Lord Arthur Holmwood, but it’s hard to imagine that he wouldn’t be a better choice to play Harker.
Not only is Elwes an actual Englishman who had appeared in period pieces before, but he had proven himself as an effective lead in a medieval fantasy romance with his brilliant performance in The Princess Bride. In all likelihood, he would have had much better chemistry with Winona Ryder, too.
Adam Brody in ‘Shazam!’ (David F Sandberg, 2019)
DC Comics tried to continue its cinematic universe in a way that was distinct from the dark, depressing style of Zack Snyder with Shazam!, a more entertaining comic book film about the teenager Billy Batson, played by Asher Angel, who is granted the power to become a superhero, played by Zachary Levi.
Although it’s a fun inverse of Big in which a kid gets to grow up overnight and deal with their new body, the issue is that Levi plays the older Billy as being too immature; Billy is supposed to be a 14-year-old, and Levi acts closer to an eight or nine-year-old child.
However, Adam Brody also appears in the film as the older, superhero version of Billy’s foster brother, Freddy Freeman, played by Jack Dylan Grazer, and would have made for a more balanced lead. It helps that Brody is himself a former teen icon from The OC who had already parodied himself in the dark comedy The Kid Detective.
