I'll be moving soon. I've been in the same apartment in Mentor, Ohio, just down the street from the James A. Garfield National Historic site (where our 20th president once lived) and a little further down the street from the public library where I work, for 12 years now, but the time has come to head back to my hometown of Ashtabula, Ohio to take care of my ancestral home.
This, of course, means I've been doing a lot of digging through closets and corners, finding things I had forgotten about and wondering what to do with them (Do I, for example, really need this folded-up poster heralding the debut of Scott Snyder's 2018 Justice League run that the publisher must have sent along with some review copies back then? What about this cardboard box from a Kickstarter I kept, just because it had Jim Lawson's handwriting on it? How about that pile of mini-comics from a past Gehngis Con that I still haven't gotten around to reading yet?).
The other night I tackled one of the drawers in my desk. It was full of the expected junk drawer components of buttons, nails and tacks, paperclips, mysterious keys and pencils and pens (at least half of which didn't work), along with business cards gathered from artists at comic conventions or art shows, corners torn from the lefthand side of envelopes with friends' addresses written on them, phone numbers and email address from past co-workers, a slip of paper with a woman's name and phone number on it I was happy to get (The woman in question? Long since married) and scraps of paper containing the writing of my late grandfather.
There was also a little penguin finger puppet holding a sign that read "Keep Cool, Uncle Caleb," that my young niece had made and mailed to me when I was suffering from a particularly bad bout of anxiety. And a list of women's names—Clothilde Ellinboe, Pansy Hammer and so on—that I couldn't quite make sense of, until I remembered it was a list of all of the love interests that appeared in the original prose short stories of Max Shulman that were collected into his 1951 book The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. (As to why I decided to make and keep a list of them, I can't remember; they are some great names, though!).
The vast majority of the mess was made of little horizontal pastel scraps of paper, each with a few words hastily scribbled on them, that were clearly from sticky notes at work. While there are a few notes about sources or ideas for books I wanted to write someday, most of them were the titles of books or DVDs that I had come across at the library, was interested in reading or watching someday but not right that moment, and so I wrote them down for Future Me to get back to someday, then put them in my desk drawer upon returning home, and then forgot about for years.
Reading them as I cleared out the drawer, I recognized the titles of only four or five that I actually ever got around to reading or watching; most I had no memory of, although Past Me helpfully usually wrote the word "book" or "DVD" next to the titles, so I at least know what form of media they were.
Among all these scraps of paper was a square of thin paper—the blank side of a receipt that would be tucked into a book on hold to let staff know where it was going—with particularly small and scribbly writing on it.
It took me a bit to figure out what it was, but it appears to be my fan cast for a Wonder Woman movie, something that has been in some form of development or other since I was in college, but really started to ramp up in the second decade of the 21st century.
I'm assuming I jotted these notes down at work one day, planning to do a blog post about it that night or that weekend, this being back when I still did blog posts on a daily-ish basis, but, like all the other scraps of paper I brought home from work, I just stuck it in my desk drawer and then forgot about it.
According to the date on the other side of the receipt I was using for scrap paper, this would have been in October of 2014, so just about ten years ago now. I'm not sure what exactly prompted my thinking about it at all, but there must have been some renewed conversation online about the Wonder Woman movie (Director Patty Jenkins wouldn't be officially attached until 2015, and, of course, the movie eventually saw release in 2017, following Wondy's debut in the terrible 2016 Batman V. Superman: Dawn of Justice.)
Anyways, as I am stuck at home with Covid at the moment with little else to distract me from just lying around and feeling miserable, I figured I might as well get around to writing this post I planned all those years ago.
This, then, is how I would have cast a live-action Wonder Woman movie if I were in charge of casting a live-action Wonder Woman movie, a decade ago...
Wonder Woman/Diana: Jessica Lowndes. There's a pretty good chance you don't know who Jessica Lowndes is; she's probably the least famous actor or actress mentioned in this post. (Here, familiarize yourself!)
She played Adrianna Tate-Duncan in the 2008-2013 90210 series, which is where I first encountered her (I am tempted to say she was the most beautiful and charismatic actress on the show, but then, the 90210 reboot also featured Jessica Stroup, who played Erin Silver, so Lowndes had some serious competition). By 2014, Londes had also appeared in a couple of horror movies (2008's Autopsy and The Haunting of Molly Hartley and 2010's Altitude, which, fun fact, was directed by comics artist Kaare Andrews).
Incredibly beautiful, with dark hair and big, blue eyes, she would have made a striking Diana. She is only 5'4, which many might think is too small to be Wonder Woman, but my vision of the character has always been aligned with that of the original William Moulton Marston/H.G. Peter version of the character, which was more girlish than the imposing warrior figure she would eventually evolve into. I think the dissonance between the more daintily designed Wonder Woman and her great strength and martial ability is more compelling than either the big and muscular warrior or Barbie doll like designs that have tended to dominate the character's post-Marston/Peter history.
Obviously, Lowndes did not get the gig, which went instead to Israeli model-turned-actress Gal Gadot, who I thought both looked the part and did a fine job of playing it in Batman V. Superman, Wonder Woman and Justice League (I never saw Wonder Woman 1984, though).
After 90210, Lowndes embarked on a music career (Confession: I've never heard a single song of hers) and has since made a career out of made-for-TV romcoms for Lifetime, the Hallmark Channel and other such venues, some of which also feature Lowndes' music.
Of course, now that what used to be called the DC Extended Universe is being rebooted by James Gunn, I suppose they will need a new actress to play Wonder Woman on the big screen, so maybe Lowndes will get her chance yet...!
Steve Trevor: Channing Tatum. Very handsome, a convincing action hero and adept at playing somewhat dim characters, I think Tatum would have made a consummate Steve Trevor.
The role went instead to Chris Pine, who I thought was quite good in the film. Tatum's career obviously didn't suffer from not being in Wonder Woman, though.
It occurs to me now that another potentially good Steve Trevor would be Ryan Gosling, who is also handsome, a fine serious and comic actor, and pretty good at playing characters that aren't necessarily the brightest.
Etta Candy: Rebel Wilson. This was pretty lazy fan-casting on my part, to be honest. Trying to think of an actress to play a plus-sized comedic character, I landed on one of the few plus-sized comedic actresses I could think of, Wilson, from 2011's Bridesmaids and 2012's Pitch Perfect.
The eventual Wonder Woman movie would cast British actress Lucy Davis of the original, British version of The Office and 2004's Shaun of the Dead as Etta Candy.
Hippolyta: Claire Danes. On my little sheet of paper, I see I wrote "Liv Tyler" after the colon following Hippolyta, then crossed it out and wrote "Claire Danes."
I am assuming I was thinking of Tyler based on the fact that she is also dark-haired and blue-eyed, and thus would resemble her daughter Diana. The post-Crisis Hippolyta does indeed look fairly similar to her daughter, as did the Golden Age version of the character, although there was a period where the character was depicted as blonde for a while.
I'm not sure why I changed my mind and wrote in Danes...I am assuming because I decided to cast Tyler elsewhere (as you'll see below). A fine actress in addition to a timeless beauty, Danes would have certainly made for a good Queen of the Amazons.
Connie Nielsen played the character in the actual film.
Aphrodite: Liv Tyler. Another instance where I apparently changed my mind, I at first wrote "Olivia Wilde" and then crossed it off, writing Tyler's name instead.
This choice seems pretty self-explanatory. Aphrodite is the goddess of beauty, and Tyler is maybe the most beautiful woman in the world...? Or at least one of them. I was an avid follower of her film career in the '90s but haven't seen all that much of her much since The Lord of the Rings trilogy wrapped (just 2004's Jersey Girl and 2008's The Incredible Hulk I see, consulting her IMDb page.) The last film I would have seen her in before taking these notes would have been the quirky little 2014 comedy Space Station 76.
I am sure I had originally written Wilde's name down because she always struck me as disconcertingly beautiful. I first noticed her in 2011's Cowboys & Aliens, where she seemed distractingly attractive; like, she was so pretty that she looked out of place in the movie and seemed miscast...like, she was clearly too beautiful to be playing that particular role, and every time she appeared on screen I would get bumped out of the necessary suspension of disbelief one needs to maintain to watch a film....even a film like Cowboys & Aliens.)
Tyler ultimately seemed a better choice, though, for the same reason I at first considered her for Hippolyta: She sort of resembles Diana (and/or Jessica Lowndes) a bit in terms of her basic features, and Diana is supposed to have the beauty of Aphrodite, so it makes sense to cast an actress who sort of resembles her a bit. (Giving it some more thought, I wonder if the character who plays Wonder Woman/Diana should also play Aphrodite, given that Diana's looks come from Aphrodite...?)
Athena: Keira Knightley. This one seems a bit obvious. Who should be cast to play a goddess? How about actual goddess Keira Knightley?
Neither Aphrodite nor Athena were used in the eventual film. In fact, if I'm remembering it correctly, it was quite light on Olympian deities, ultimately only featuring a single one, and a god at that, rather than a goddess.
The Cheetah: Kristen Bell. I have no idea what I thought the plot of this film I was pretending to cast would have been, other than that it would take place during World War II and be inspired by the Marston/Peter comics. Because I wrote down casting for like five villains and, in general, I've always been a proponent of having only one villain per comic book superhero movie, given how many of the superhero movies I've seen with two villains seem to go off the rails.
Anyway, the first villain I wrote down was The Cheetah, and I was of course envisioning the Golden Age Priscilla Rich version, a woman in a cheetah costume, rather than the Barbara Ann Minerva were-cheetah version that was introduced during George Perez's post-Crisis run on Wonder Woman.
I have no idea why I thought this would be a good role for Bell; perhaps I had just seen her in something (most likely 2013's The Lifeguard) and she was on my mind the day I was scribbling these notes?
Anyway, The Cheetah would indeed make it into a Wonder Woman film, although not the first one; she appeared in the 2020 sequel Wonder Woman 1984, played by Kristen Wiig. Wiig played the Barbara Ann Minerva version, rather than the Priscilla Rich version.
Baroness Paula von Gunther: Carice van Houten. Although The Cheetah is probably Wondy's best-known recurring villain (the result, I'd guess, of appearing in the Super Friends series of cartoons), she's not the first. That honor goes to Paula von Gunther, a ruthless Nazi spy and saboteur who first appeared in 1942 and was another creation of Marston and Peter's.
Though somewhat generic for a villain of the time, what made her interesting to me was the fact that she eventually became a sympathetic character and, with Wonder Woman's help, ultimately reformed and joined the Amazons on Paradise Island. She was therefore a very early example of Wonder Woman not simply killing or locking up her foes, but actually striving to reform and redeem them into better people.
As to why I picked Carice van Houten, it was almost certainly on the strength of her role in the somewhat silly but all-around awesome 2001 film Miss Minoes, where she played a cat that gets turned into a human girl. (I think I also probably assumed she was German, although it turns out she's Dutch.)
Since then van Houten has appeared in plenty of films, although looking at her IMDb page now, I think the only one I actually saw was 2006's Black Book. I suppose she's now best known for playing a character on Game of Thrones...?
As for Von Gunther, she never made it into onto the Silver Screen but she did appear in an episode of Batman: The Brave and The Bold which, like all episodes of Batman: The Brave and The Bold, was awesome (Oh, and Wikipedia says she was on the original 1970s Wonder Woman TV show, which was obviously well before my time.)
Doctor Psycho: Peter Dinklage. Another rather lazy choice on my part. For the part of Wonder Woman's diminutive, woman-hating villain, a hypnotist and occultist with a hardly subtle name, I of course thought of Dinklage, the best-known actor of a certain size. Dinklage has obviously played a villain to great acclaim before, but, to my knowledge, not one as straight-up over-the-top as the wild-eyed, wild-haired Psycho.
The character never made it into a film adaptation yet, although Dinklage has had roles in two superhero films, playing Dr. Trask in 2014's X-Men: Days of Future Past and a giant of Norse mythology in 2018's Avengers: Infinity War.
Marva Psycho: Lucy Collins or Haley Bennett. Doctor Psycho's fiancée-turned-wife plays heavily in the drama of his origin and becomes necessary to him when he starts exhibiting occult powers, Psycho having used her as a medium from which he pulled ectoplasm...which probably didn't seem as weird in the 1940s, so much closer to the age of spiritualism, than it does now.
I'm not entirely sure what my thinking on this casting was, aside from the fact that I had then just-recently seen both actresses for the first time (in 2012's Mirror Mirror and 2009's The Hole, respectively) and liked them both a lot.
Both actresses seem to have been working pretty regularly since my first exposure to them, and on some fairly sizable project, especially Collins, who has gone on to success in television with Emily in Paris.
Hercules: The Rock or John Cena. Ha ha, maybe my least imaginative choice yet! For the part of Hercules, I narrowed it down to two charismatic, extremely muscular professional wrestlers-turned-actors, one of whom I had just seen playing Hercules a few months prior...! (That would be The Rock, er, Dwayne Johnson, in the 2014 Hercules movie, based on the short-lived Radical Comics Hercules series by Steve Moore and Admira Wijaya...I remember liking the film quite a bit at the time, although now I haven't many specific memories of it.)
Both actors would of course go on to play DC super-people, with Cena playing Peacemaker in 2021's The Suicide Squad and a TV show that followed it to great acclaim, and Johnson playing starring in 2022's Black Adam to...less so.
Ares/Mars: Ian McShane. That Hercules movie must have made an impression on me, as Ian McShane was also in that, and here it seems I cast him as the god of war, using either the Greek or Roman name (I remember reading about Mars in the Golden Age Wonder Woman comics, although obviously Ares would become one of her biggest recurring villains, especially during the Perez era.)
There are then two lines of writing that I can't read at all; while it looks like there may be some names among them, I don't recognize those names, and they don't appear to be English...?
Anyway, thus ends the post I thought about writing ten years ago.
Stop back on October 6th for the next installment of "A Month of Wednesdays".
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