The art of stunt casting: shows that pick the perfect actors
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Version 0 of 1. Stunt casting takes different forms. The flashiest involves a distractingly famous person popping up in a small TV or movie role – think of Brad Pitt’s fractious Thanksgiving on Friends or Prince offering relationship advice on New Girl. The more interesting approach goes a little deeper, inviting viewers to acknowledge an actor’s previous work: part Easter egg, part dog whistle, it’s catnip for cult TV fans and speedy superhero show The Flash seems intent on raising it to an art form – the show heads up this rundown of notable examples. Almost every guest star on The Flash The brightest, breeziest comicbook show of the current bumper crop has some legacy casting baked-in: the Flash’s dad is played by John Wesley Shipp, who squeezed into the scarlet speedster’s costume in the 1990s. Mark Hamill, who battled Shipp’s Flash as the Trickster, will also make a callback appearance later this season, while Wentworth Miller and Dominic Purcell recently staged a very buzz-marketable Prison Break reunion as ice-and-fire villains Captain Cold and Heat Wave. There’s even more to come: Walking Dead star Emily Kinney has just signed up to play “the Bug-Eyed Bandit” in an episode that will also feature former movie Superman Brandon Routh. Sara Gilbert in The Big Bang Theory The Big Bang Theory splices broad laughs with pointy-headed physics talk, justifying a parade of geek-friendly cameos, including Star Trek royalty (including Leonard Nimoy and Wil Wheaton) and real-life science trailblazers (like Buzz Aldrin and Stephen Hawking). But the casting of Roseanne’s Sara Gilbert as Leslie Winkle, a love interest for brainiac Leonard (Johnny Galecki), was the equivalent of inventing a time machine: suddenly, millions of viewers were transported back to the glory days of Roseanne, where the relationship between Darlene (Gilbert) and David (Galecki) played out over several seasons. Ricky Tomlinson and Sue Johnston in The Royle Family They spend so much time in front of the telly, it’s a wonder no one in the Royle family has ever commented that patriarch Jim (Tomlinson) and matriarch Barb (Johnston) bear an uncanny resemblance to Bobby and Sheila Grant, a righteous, riotous working-class couple from the very earliest days of Brookside. It being a soap, things didn’t end well for the Grants, but thanks to Caroline Aherne and Craig Cash’s beautifully observed, award-winning Gogglebox prequel, there’s an alternate timeline where Bobby and Sheila shared a long, sedentary life surrounded by family, friends and Ant and Dec. Sylvester McCoy in Doctors BBC1’s cheap-and-cheerful daytime soap is a proving ground for young writers and a staging post for veteran actors. So when a 2008 episode called for a character who had previously acted in a cult 1980s TV show about a time-traveller, casting the former Doctor Sylvester McCoy was a Master stroke. Playing the onetime star of the very British, very ramshackle The Amazing Lollipop Man, McCoy brought a plausible, lived-in fragility to a man struggling to come to terms with the world of DVD commentaries and convention appearances, while also guaranteeing that this particular Doctors episode would be spotlighted on sci-fi blogs across the galaxy. Martin Landau and Barbara Bain in Space: 1999 After spending the late-1960s appearing in Mission: Impossible, real-life married couple Landau and Bain were subsequently recruited into Gerry Anderson’s 1970s space programme. Producers presumably hoped their familiar faces would help sell Space: 1999 in the US, which would turn out to be its own kind of mission impossible. Plenty of sci-fi shows cannibalise the genre’s past casting: 1990s space opera Babylon 5 featured Star Trek’s Walter Koenig in a recurring role, presumably to put viewers in mind of the earlier show, while the gritty Battlestar Galactica reboot went full meta by hiring original star Richard Hatch (Captain Apollo) to play Zarek, a political agitator keen to capsize the current continuity and get back to the good old days. Les Dennis in Coronation Street In less than a year, former Family Fortunes host Dennis has quickly settled into life in Weatherfield as Michael Rodwell, a guy with a dodgy past and, increasingly, a dodgy ticker. In its storied history, Corrie has welcomed everyone from Ian McKellen to Status Quo as guest stars, but Dennis is the only cast member who used to make their living “doing Mavis”, which can still create the odd jolt of cognitive dissonance. |