Two of the best stories of the year came from Patty Jenkins bringing fresh feminist vitality to “Wonder Woman” and Ridley Scott quickly replacing Kevin Spacey with Christopher Plummer in “All the Money in the World,” the latter completed in just 10 days of reshoots, just six weeks before the movie’s release.
“All the Money in the World” writer, David Scarpa, spoke to THR about the stressful, and secretive, transition that had to be made once they knew Spacey would have to be replaced. “When a call goes out to the casting agencies, ‘Ridley Scott is looking for an actor to play a 90-year-old guy,’ pretty much everybody knows what movie that is,” said Scarpa, referring to Scott’s attempt to find an older actor to replace Spacey’s role in which he had facial prosthetic’s and heavy makeup to look like billionaire John Paul Getty. How do you keep such a secretive dilemma so hush-hush? You ask for help from a counterpart, in this case it was Patty Jenkins who had a casting call for a role in her TNT limited drama series “One Day She’ll Darken,” Scarpa explained “Ridley’s casting agents basically asked if they could send the call out for the part under their production’s name, So basically it was, ‘Patty Jenkins is looking for a 90-year-old guy.’ That was basically how they were able to do it. There was a lot of this sort of … crafty maneuvers to make this thing come off.”
The recasting was a truly historic moment unlike we’d ever seen before in Hollywood. It paid off. Plummer earned a much-deserved Golden Globe nomination for his acting, and, if it were up to me at least, he deserves to be nominated for an Oscar. This is staggering, epic work from the 88-year-old actor.
Let’s hope Scarpa has a better, less controversial experience with the upcoming “Cleopatra” movie he wrote for Denis Villeneuve, than he had with “All the Money in the World” or, even, the tumultuous production director Joseph L. Mankiewicz had to face with 1963’s “Cleopatra,” which went over-budget and infamously bombed at the box-office