Some people play "fantasy football," so, naturally, Isabel and I decided we would start playing "fantasy Shakespeare."
Today's game consisted of trying to cast a "fantasy King Lear." Of all the Shakespeare plays for which to fantasize an ideal cast, we felt this one was most pressing...since you generally want to cast Lear with people who might not be around long enough to finish memorizing their lines.
For example...I had wished for years someone would cast Charlton Heston as Lear. It would have been the perfect cap to his career, going from Moses and Ben Hur, to a raging, violent, somewhat senile old man...
Maybe it would have been typecasting.
Anyway, here's the line-up we fantasized so far:
The "A CAST"
William Shatner as Lear
Harrison Ford as Kent
Emma Watson as Cordelia
Uma Thurman/Angelina Jolie as Regan/Goneril (does it really matter which is which?)
Hugh Jackman as Edmund
Benedict Cumberbatch as Edgar
Steve Martin as the Fool
Christian Bale as Cornwall (he'd probably have demanded the part of Lear and want to change the ending, and that would be his motivation for his part)
Martin Freeman as Albany
Robin Williams as Gloucester (wouldn't you be disturbed for weeks if you had to watch Mork have his eyes gouged out?)
The B CAST
Brian Cox as Lear (he would have been in the A cast, but we figure nobody knows him by name in America)
Samuel L. Jackson as Kent
Jack Nicholson as Gloucester
J. Lo as either Regan or Goneril
Zoey Deschanel as the other one
The Twilight Girl for Cordelia
Matt Damon as Edgar
Joseph Gordon Levitt as Edmund (maybe he should be in the A cast...maybe he would be an A cast Edgar...)
Nathan Fillion as Cornwall
Sean Astin as Albany
Ricky Gervais as the Fool
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