Are There Truly Roles that You Can’t Recast?

[Sawyer]

I don’t know if thing is specific only to film characters, but considering he was in a film, I’m going to have to throw out...

No one— NO ONE— but MacLachlan exists in the overlap between golden boy and weirdo like he does.

 

[Deck Rickard]

Yeah, I’m not the biggest fan of MacLachlan but he is in kind of a class all his own there.

 

[metaphysician]

You see the flak they got for Solo.

Eh, Solo got flack beforehand because every major recast gets flack. To the extent that this remains the narrative, its simply that Solo wasn't a good enough movie, and Ehrenreich didn't give a good enough performance, to displace that starting assumption. Contrast that that Glover's Lando in the same movie, which had people going "give this man a movie, or at least a Disney+ show!"

( It naturally didn't help that Solo came mere months after possibly the most divisive movie of the generation. That is not the time to be a merely average or unexceptional film, you need solid unambiguous quality when half the fanbase is actively writing off the franchise. )

 

[Eddie Dean]

Except that actually Alden was good and brought his own take on the character while still staying true to Ford and Glover gave an SNL skit impression of Billy Dee Williams.

 

[Deck Rickard]

Haha yeah I found Alden underrated. I thought Glover was fine but I think people overrated his performance a bit just because he’s become so popular due to other things. I think the movie had some problems but overall it was pretty decent and people just had a hate-on for it before it even came out. Now, to be fair, we didn’t really need a Solo prequel so I kind of understand it. But for what it was, I liked it.

 

[Kahran Ramsus]

Solo is a film that has grown on me over time, and I liked the overall story and the performances were fine. It had some pacing issues, and there was a recurring problem where there would be a particular segment set in some different place and they would set up these characters and then kill them off soon after (more than once I would see a new character and think "hey this new character is pretty cool...and now they're dead, so much for that) and move to the next segment, giving it a disjointed feel for much of the film. As a result only Han and Beckett are characters that I really got to care about. That's not an issue with the recast though. I think it probably would have been better received if it was released at a different time.