With the six-month casting saga for “Spider-Man” finally ending with Andrew Garfield landing the role last night, we were hoping that some of the upcoming superhero movies might start finally locking down their casts. As it turns out, our hopes were in vain; a big rival Marvel superhero movie appears to be in the process of replacing one of its leads.
Stage actor Benjamin Walker (“Kinsey”) was reported to have landed the key role of Hank McCoy, aka Beast, in Matthew Vaughn’s “X-Men: First Class,” a reboot of the mutant franchise. However Baz Bamigboye at the Daily Mail, someone as rare as a unicorn in that he’s the only reliable UK tabloid reporter, is now reporting that Walker was officially signed by Fox, and then dropped.
Apparently, the issue is one of age; with James McAvoy, 31, and Michael Fassbender, 33, being cast as Professor X and Magneto (and both could pass for younger; McAvoy was playing college-aged only a few years ago), the 28-year-old Walker was deemed too old to play McCoy, one of the pupils at Xavier’s school. Fox supposedly took the decision to replace the actor, paying him off and widening the hunt, screentesting three other potential Beasts yesterday.
But, wait, there’s more. Apparently, those three didn’t work out, and Bamigboye heard last night that Fox may now be offering the role to Walker. Again. Twist! But the actor may be fed up of being strung along at this point — the Public Theatre musical “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson,” in which he played the lead, is moving to Broadway, and Walker may end up following it there.
The rushed timeline of the film (Vaughn was only hired at the beginning of May, and cameras roll in August, for a release date next June) is clearly to blame here; with a condensed casting period, they don’t have the luxury to cast their lead first and then rearrange around them, as Sony have done with Spidey (HitFix reports that the script for that film, originally set in high school, is being re-written for college in order to accommodate Garfield, who’s older than other candidates). Instead, they’re casting on the run, which is clearly going to lead to situations like this. Still, the names mentioned so far are mostly strong actors, so hopefully it’ll come to a good end.
In related news, recent news from Comic Book Movie and Avengers News are both reporting that Multiple Man, a mutant capable of creating replicas of himself, is part of the line-up for the movie, the latter suggesting that Kevin Pennington (“90210”), who was previously rumor-linked to a role in “The Avengers,” may be on board to play him. Neither site have much of a track record for accurate scoops, so take the whole thing with a pinch of salt.
