Audiences decide very quickly if a certain actor is an acceptable, believable choice for a certain character. Or not. We’re all familiar with pre-2010 casting decisions that were instantly derided by the planet earth as unpalatable but what are some of the more glaring casting mistakes of the last, oh, six or seven years?
All-Time Classics: (1) Patricia Arquette as an actress pretending to be a doctor in John Boorman‘s Beyond Rangoon (’95); (2) Jack Black as Carl Denham in Peter Jackson‘s King Kong (’05); (3) Seth Rogen as Britt Reid in The Green Hornet (’11); (4) Hayden Christensen as New Republic feature writer Stephen Glass (his college preppie voice and mock-vulnerable social manner were so grating that it was impossible to accept that seasoned journalists would have bought his schtick) in Shattered Glass; (5) Warren Beatty as a thin Oliver Hardy in The Fortune (’75); (6) Gregory Peck as Josef Mengele in The Boys From Brazil (’78); (7) Jamie Dornan in Fifty Shades of Gray (lacking in studly intensity); (8) Denise Richards as an idiotically grinning pilot in Starship Troopers; (9) John Wayne as a Roman Centurion in George Stevens‘ The Greatest Story Ever Told (’65); and (10) Frank Sinatra as a soft-spoken priest in Miracle of the Bells (’48).