I'm okay with Ford reincarnating Indiana Jones again as long as he plays him as an old man, though if it's as shit as that Crystal Skull guff who cares anyway. Far worse was Roger Moore still pretending to be James Bond when he was 58.
The awful George Best biopic Best is full of them. John Lynch, who looks nothing like George, was 39 at the time, Jerome Flynn as Bobby Charlton, Ian Hart as Nobby Stiles and Linus Roache as Denis Law were all similarly way too old as well. But the worst casting was 56 year old Roger Daltrey playing Rodney Marsh in his 30s.
Alan Ruck was 29 when he played 17/18-year-old Cameron in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Matthew Broderick was 23, but still looks very young.
I can think of some examples where the character in the film is a different age then they were in the source material - book or comic book - and sometimes a character's age will shift a lot from the original script. As I recall, Roger Sterling in Mad Men was originally supposed to be a much older guy, instead he's just a few years older than Don Draper and, I believe, also a Korean War veteran as opposed to a WWII veteran.
The awful George Best biopic Best is full of them. John Lynch, who looks nothing like George, was 39 at the time, Jerome Flynn as Bobby Charlton, Ian Hart as Nobby Stiles and Linus Roache as Denis Law were all similarly way too old as well. But the worst casting was 56 year old Roger Daltrey playing Rodney Marsh in his 30s.
Stockard Channing was 34 when she played the part of teenage Rizzo in Grease.
That’s astonishing.
I think this may be common in musicals because it usually takes so long for somebody to train to be able to do musical theater properly.
It’s also common with Shakespeare. Romeo & Juliet are supposed to be dumb teenagers, but not many teenagers can do the parts justice as well as older actors with some more experience and training. Same with Hamlet, especially Ophelia.
Brenda Blethyn is 74 and is still portraying a serving police officer in Vera - she was at the compulsory retirement age when she began in 2011, but police pensions are so gold plated that it's very rare for them to continue once they hit 30 years. Perhaps that's why Vera is different.
See also David Jason in A Touch if Frost.
There was a BBC docu-drama called Holy Flying Circus, which was based around the famous interview between Cleese, Palin, Malcolm Muggeridge and (Bishop) Mervyn Stockwood.
Anyway, Steve Punt played Eric Idle and he was a good 20 years older than all his Monty Python contemporaries.
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