No Batman for Ben

My biggest problem with the casting of Ben Affleck is not specifically about Ben Affleck, but about casting anyone who is so well defined in my mind, and so incapable of acting outside that definition. Most actors, through their body of work and in conjunction with their public personas, take on a perceived personality that influences how we see them in future roles…and for the most part this is why they get cast in certain roles going forward. Think about male leads like Bruce Willis, Tom Cruise, Harrison Ford, Leonardo DiCaprio, Tommy Lee Jones, Mark Whalburg, Nicholas Cage, Samuel Jackson, or female leads like Natalie Portman, Charlize Theron, Jennifer Anistion, Angelina Jolie, Halle Berry, Gwyneth Paltro, Selma Hayek, or Sandra Bullock. Hell you can pretty much anyone and if you’ve seen enough movies you have a 90% chance of knowing what to expect from a movie with their name on it. Generally I’m good with that! Because I usually don’t yet have much invested in a film’s characters and I like to know that Vin Diesel will give me Riddick, Jason Statham will give me Frank Martin and Milla Jovovich will give me Leeloo. And I'm open to these actors going off and creating new characters like Charlize in Monster, or Tom as Stacee Jax (awesome!) because again I don’t have anything previously invested in those characters.

The problem with casting for superheroes is that, for the faithful, they are already very strong personalities and characters. And generally we, the audience, are not looking for those characters to be significantly re-defined and we certainly are not looking for them to be co-opted by the perceived personality of an already defined actor personality. Really we just want the hero personality we know and love to be presented again doing even cooler things than we’ve seen them do before. In some ways casting a superhero is more like casting for a historical figure that everyone knows and loves.

To date, the three best superhero casting jobs have been a virtual unknown in Christopher Reeve, a pretty versatile actor, who you could ague was fairly undefined at the time he was cast, in Christian Bale, and an actor whose perceived persona almost exactly matched the hero’s personality in Robert Downey Jr. But when an actor is cast who already has a strong perceived personality that is in conflict with the hero’s personality, it creates a contradiction that requires extreme acting ability to overcome. I think Ben Affleck has done a great job in some of his films, and I’ve enjoyed them, but I always know I’m watching Ben Affleck. He has never been able to act outside of the personality that his films have defined for him.

So 'no' on the batman thing...even though I'll still see the movie when it comes out. Doh!