Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/760821
CREDIT CREDIT CREDIT CREDIT IN CASTING REAL-LIFE FIGURES, DIRECTORS WERE MORE CONCERNED WITH SPIRIT THAN RESEMBLANCE Match Point 66 DGA QUARTERLY I C O N O C L A S T S : From the top: Conscientious objector and war hero Desmond Doss and his wife Dorothy; mathematician and NASA recruit Katherine Johnson; Mildred and Richard Loving, who successfully challenged a statute barring interracial marriage in Virginia; exiled CIA whistleblower Edward Snowden. O PHOTOS: (TOP TO BOTTOM) LIBRARY OF VIRGINIA; COURTESY OF NASA; BETTMAN/GETTY IMAGES; BARTON GELLMAN/GETTY IMAGES ne thing that's nice about doing a movie about people that hardly anyone knows," says director Theodore Melfi, "you never worry if they're a perfect match." The whole point of Melfi's Hidden Figures is that the African-American women in the NASA program are unjustly unknown. In a similar vein, we don't really know Desmond Doss, the hero of Mel Gibson's Hacksaw Ridge; Richard and Mildred Loving in Jeff Nichols' Loving; or Phi- ona Mutesi in Mira Nair's Queen of Katwe. Even the face of Ray Kroc, the title character of John Lee Hancock's The Founder, is far less known than that of his more colorful wife, Joan. In all of these cases, the directors enjoyed the freedom of casting actors who didn't have to correspond to the precise physical im- age imprinted on the public imagination. Gibson learned when he signed up for Hacksaw that Andrew Garfield was already gung-ho for the role of Doss, but didn't mind that Garfield didn't "exactly look like Desmond. I only really needed to convince him not to wear a moustache, like Desmond did at some points. It made him look like a used car salesman." For the role of Mildred in Loving, Nichols says Ruth Negga was the first person to read for the part, "and she nailed it. Precise physical resemblance wasn't important." He was already set on Joel Edg- erton, with whom he had worked on Midnight Special, for Richard. "Once I decide on casting, I get pretty stubborn about it." On The Founder, after casting Michael Keaton as Ray Kroc, Hancock zeroed in on who would play the McDonald brothers with whom Kroc sparred for control of the burgeoning fast- food company. Hancock says the proof that he made the right choices with John Carroll Lynch and Nick Offerman came during shoot- ing: "I knew Michael, John and Nick would bring completely different energies to their scenes. Michael's is a focused calm; John's is sweet- natured; Nick's is that of an engineer but more aggressive than John. So that what I got out of each was a back-and-forth battle of wills, ex- actly what we wanted." The eclectic casting for Hidden Figures re- flects the movie's wide-ranging tonal shifts from human comedy to space-age drama. "Octavia Spencer provides a different energy from the in- tensity of Taraji P. Henson, who shows here once again that she can play just as restrained as she plays broad as Cookie on Empire." With Henson, Melfi faced the challenge of how to pull off a situation in which her math genius character, Katherine, would deal with having to walk all the way across the vast NASA campus in order to go to a bathroom designated for black women. "We knew that this was already a sad situation and a disgust- ing example of the old Jim Crow South," he says. "So I realized that you can either make it sadder, or make it more interesting and find the comedy in it. I worked with Taraji to get this physical comedy just right so that it was grounded in character, not in some shtick. That's the comedy I prefer, more in the vein of Terms of Endearment." Only Oliver Stone, with Snowden, had to con- front the common challenge of biopic casting in which the actor must resemble a famous face. "Joe [Joseph Gordon-Levitt] was on board very early, very committed, and nobody else was ever really considered," says Stone. "I took him to meet Ed (Snowden) in Moscow. He saw Ed as an indoor cat, never going outside. Ed's pretty inexpressive, and Joe took that very seri- ously. Joe's approach here was to be minimalist."