The Casting Game: The Bujold novels...

The Casting Game for favourite books is always fun. Usually I do it for Dunnett novels - I remember once doing a panel on it in Philadelphia, where people voted for their favourite nominations. (Some good, some abominable.)

We were doing this lately on the Lois McMaster Bujold mailing list (again) and I felt moved to actually make out a list of suggestions. There are so many ways of going about the casting game. You can pick actors who seem to have the right features at the right time of their lives; or you can cast people who would be suitable for the parts now. You can can cast for looks, or cast for personal style, or cast for suitable acting ability, or combine all three in varying degrees.

Some of these choices I feel committed to as good, some are just the best I can think of now, and some are hopelessly inadequate but viable. Some (like Aral) I have alternatives for, but I'll
just put first choice. If you're curious, my alternate choices for Aral were Gerard Butler and (when he was the right age) Nick Mancuso.

I had a notion it would be best to cast Barrayarans as Europeans and Betans as Americans, but then I failed to carry through, and cast a number of Canadians and Australians.

Aral Vorkosigan - Gabriel Byrne
Cordelia Naismith - Claudia Black
Ges Vorrutyer - Rufus Sewell
Count Piotr Vorkosigan - Christopher Plummer
Emperor Ezar - Patrick Stewart
Emperor Gregor - Ioan Gruffudd
Simon Illyan - John Simm
Bothari - Matt Frewer
Ivan Vorpatril - John Barrowman
Ekaterin - Anna Friel
Elli Quinn - Erica Durance

I find the women most difficult to cast.

Trying to think now of a good Byerly...

(no subject)

I found an interesting list of movies set in the middle ages set up on the University of Toronto website. What's interesting is how few of them I've seen.

I found it by stumbling across The Anchoress as a movie featuring Christopher Eccleston.