I am so behind on blogging about Catching Fire castings, I know, but I thought that I'd catch up by sharing my thoughts on the recent castings for the upcoming film (I say upcoming it's still over a year until the film comes out...that seems like so long away, doesn't it?).But anyway, it's great to see that all of the main cast are coming back, which isn't a major surprise, but there's always that little doubt that someone might drop out. I for one came across rumours floating around that Josh Hutcherson had "apparently" claimed that he didn't want to be typecast by playing a role for so many films. But, then again, he's recently been in the sequel to another series of films and he knew what he was signing up for when he took the role, therefore I think that it was probably just internet trolling yet again!
And then there was the clashes between filming for Catching Fire and the second X-Men film which would have caused our leading lady Jennifer Lawrence a great deal of problems. Fortunately, a compromise was met and filming for X-Men was, I believe, pushed back. She really is busy these days!
Whilst we all appear to be waiting with baited breathe to find out who is going to be playing Finnick Odair, Lionsgate have created this Facebook Page to share castings:
Philip Seymour Hoffman's casting as Plutarch Heavensbee (Wes Bentley's Seneca Crane replacement) hasn't really caused any great reaction in me, purely because the character isn't "quite" as important as some other ones. Despite that, I do feel that Hoffman is a good casting purely because he's a great actor; I just wish he had a shorter name ;)
Although it doesn't appear on the Casting Page on Facebook, it has also been confirmed that Johanna Mason will be played by Sucker Punch and Donnie Darko actress: Jena Malone.Initially, I wasn't really too sure about Malone's casting, because Johanna is such a strong character and I wasn't sure if Malone would be able to pull it off. However, after a lot of thought I did have to recognize that Malone was great as Rocket in Sucker Punch. The character certainly had the balls and attitude that are necessary for Johanna. But, I'm still going to wait and see on this one.
No other castings have been confirmed, as of yet, so we're still waiting for Mags, Beetee, other district tributes etc, but as I said above Finnick is definitely the character that everyone seems to be getting the most excited about. I won't go into the rumours about who has or hasn't auditioned, but I'm not going to deny that I have my favourites (I don't think there is a fan out there that doesn't have at least a mild opinion on this one because it's difficult not to).
My personal favourites have got to be Mirror Mirror's Armie Hammer or Tron Legacy's Garrett Hedlund, but appearance-wise (and yes, being completely superficial) I think that Hammer would be perfect. He has the good-looking smarmy kind of charm that I think would be great for Finnick. I think I'll be disappointed if he doesn't get the role, but it'll be interested to see how this affair ends. It's no real surprise that Lionsgate are really stringing us along with this one!!
What do you think of the recent castings, or who do you think should play Finnick, Mags, Beetee etc?
