Extra, Extra!: Beauty & the Beast Gets Its Principle Cast

In which I report on the latest in entertainment news.

What do you do when you're Disney - a company who built its entire cinematic empire off of the backs of princesses and classic fairy tales?  There are only so many of those to go around, and fewer still that are worth the effort of adapting.  What do you do when there is simply nothing left to churn into the latest must-see animated adventure?

If Disney's recent successes are to be believed, there are actually two things that you can do.  You can either become self-reflexive -  meta-fictively delving into the sanitised identity that you've spent decades creating for yourself - or you can flex your money-making muscles into live-action remakes of your classic cartoons.  The former option has given us Enchanted, Frozen and Maleficent, while the latter has given us Maleficent, next week's Cinderella and the recently announced Beauty & the Beast.

Of these last three, Beauty and the Beast is the one that is understandably getting the most people excited.  Maleficent was a surprisingly dark take on one of Disney's most iconic villains and Cinderella has an absolutely inspired choice for a director, but Beauty & the Beast is arguably the best of the Disney Renaissance (the other contender being The Lion King) and the only animated movie to be nominated for Best Picture before the category expanded into as many as ten entries in recent years.  And, what's more, it is proving to have one of the most exciting casts of any upcoming movie.

Emma Watson as Belle - This is the one that got people to take more notice than a cursority interest at what a live-action Beauty & the Beast would even look like.  The veteran Harry Potter actress has proven to so be insatiably popular that she had to take a hiatus from college due to her inability to focus on her studies due to the attention she received there.  Since then, she's redoubled her efforts at being more than just Hermione.

She's taken on a range of supporting roles and cameos that show off the full range of her talents.  The most memorable of these was when she took on her perception as a bookishly "good girl" type (ala Hermione Granger and her own stretches at Brown and Oxford Universities) in the raucussly funny This Is the End, where she robbed and assaulted a group of A-listers who she mistakenly thought were working out the logistics of raping her.

 

Dan Stevens as Beast - This is the casting choice that has me most excited for the project.  Not many people are familiar with this fresh face to the acting scene, but those who do most likely remember him from his stint on Downton Abbey as Matthew Crawley.  Paired with his other experiences at period dramas - notably on Sense & Sensibility and Masterpiece Classic - he seems perfectly suited for the role of a cursed prince.

I, however, recognized him from last year's The Guest - which I listed among the best movies of 2014.  In that film, he played a deranged former soldier inadvertently terrorizing his comrade's family in his misguided attempts at helping them.  His dark charisma in The Guest - in which he looks like the illegitimate love-child of Tom Hardy and Ryan Gosling - lends itself perfectly to an edgier version of the character than audiences were treated to in 1991.

Luke Evans as Gaston - Although I am less excited about Luke Evans than the previous two, I am at a loss to offer any kind of substantive criticism about the casting decision.  He suitably fits the bill as a young, reasonably charismatic action star who has been in popular movies of admittedly dubious merit.

That being said, he certainly looks the part, and all of his leading man charisma will lend itself to narcissistic, misogynistic Gaston.  Let's just hope that this is Evans' breakout role into the mainstream, because I'd rather not think of the alternative.

So which of the above casting decisions has you most excited for the movie?

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