Hollywood inks contracts for Inkheart
I had some questions when I first read that news on Child_Lit. Not just about the casting (Is Fraser physically too imposing? vocally too mild?) or how those actors will go about their jobs (Bettany learned to play the cello for Master and Commander; will he now learn to eat fire?). Rather, I wondered if casting this story's good guys first was going about the task the right way. Inkheart needs to have frightful villains--not just cinematic thrill providers, but what-am-I-doing-sitting-here-in-the-dark? terrifiers.
But then I thought about the best villainous performances (adjusting for genre) that I recalled from recent years. The American Film Institute has its top 50 villains, but these are names that occurred to me:
What did all those performers have in common? Most are excellent actors. Most had years of experience in movies or on stage. But they weren't stars. Heck, Stone had done Police Academy 4. The closest to star status was Hopkins, who'd been the lead in Magic; his status as minor celebrity in 1991 fit the role of Hannibal Lecter, notorious killer, while Ted Levine played Lambs' real menace to the star. In sum, the casting of these actors wasn't the sort to be announced with fanfare in Variety. Which meant that when we saw them acting evil on screen, we couldn't reassure ourselves that they were just movie stars.
In fact, those roles--often career breakthroughs--tended to spoil the actors' scariness as villains afterwards. Hopper in Blue Velvet was deeply disturbing, rising from the depths of career banishment and addiction and bringing what looked like total derangement up with him. Hopper in Speed and Waterworld was simply a Hollywood villain, almost as much a parody of Hopper as Spacey's voicing of the villainous grasshopper in A Bug's Life.
So it's still vitally important who will play Capricorn, Basta, and the Magpie in this Inkheart movie. But, I realized, I'm better off not knowing who it will be.
