Anticipations
Casting is all about “image.” If you don’t have the look, you can’t play the part (at least, that’s the way most casting agents go about things.) But who gets the final say in what they’re looking for? In a mini, informal case study, let’s take a look at one of the most iconic films in Hollywood: Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.
The movie’s leading character, Jack Torrance, was played by the critically acclaimed Jack Nicholson. Audiences and critics alike raved about his performance and lines like “heeeeere’s Johnny!” are known across the globe decades later. But though Nicholson was loved by so many, he wasn’t loved by Torrance’s author. The Shining wasn’t originally Kubrick’s story to tell; it is a novel written by the infamous Stephan King, and King didn’t see Nicholson as Torrance at all.
Stephan and Stanly had very different ideas of this story, in fact, King wrote a screenplay for The Shining that Kubrick didn’t even deem worthy of reading. Three years after the 1980’s film was released, King did an interview with Playboy about it. He told Playboy that he’d “admired Kubrick for a long time and had great expectations for the project, but [he] was deeply disappointed in the end result. Parts of the film are chilling, charged with a relentlessly claustrophobic terror, but others fell flat.” And King actually said that one of his biggest disappointments was the casting of Jack Nicholson. “Jack Nicholson, though a fine actor, was all wrong for the part. His last big role had been in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and between that and the manic grin, the audience automatically identified him as a loony from the first scene. But the book is about Jack Torrance’s gradual descent into madness through the malign influence of the Overlook — if the guy is nuts to begin with, then the entire tragedy of his downfall is wasted.” Stephan King is the person who invented Jack Nicholson, but as a work of cinema this was Stanley Kubrick’s piece, so who should get to decide how the character is portrayed?
King was unsurprisingly right about his character: when Torrance is portrayed by Nicholson, audiences were easily able to anticipate his arch because Nicholson’s type had become this crazy, manic character. In 1976’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest his portrayal of Randle Patrick McMurphy landed him an Oscar for Best Leading Actor, but he played this asylum patient so well that the image of that character was imprinted on the audience. Now, everyone who sees Nicholson remembers this character and be it conscious or not, they associate him with those traits. As King said, this eliminates the arch of Jack Torrence, as his madness is an expected destination rather than an unexpected descent. But Nicholson was the Torrence that Kubrick and his team chose for their movie. And Nicholson is a fantastic actor, with 40 acting award nominations and 14 wins, why shouldn’t Kubrick have chosen this fantastic actor to play his Jack Torrence, even if his “type” would indicate his character to the audience?
King may have written this character hoping that the audience would be surprised at his transformation, but by casting Jack Nicholson, Stanley Kubrick eliminated that shock. Nicholson’s type is this manic, cruel psycho: this is what audiences expect when they see him on screen, so regardless of who he is in real life, or who the character he is about to portray will be, that’s what the audience anticipates. Should Kubrick have honored the original character arch as it was written by King? Because it’s his movie, does the character’s conception matter? And should he have been more conscious of existing audience bias when casting this role, or was it right to pick the actor he knew had the best capacity for the part? These nuances and questions are all considerations in the casting room. Typecasting can completely change the trajectory of a character, and Jack Nicholson is a great example of how notably bias impacts audience expectations.
