Re-using actors and the occasional failure to suspend that disbelief.

Do you ever find that casting choices can sometimes spoil your enjoyment of films and TV shows? I don’t mean the casting of someone in a role they don’t suit – that happens all the time (*cough* Stallone *cough* Dredd *cough*), but because of a role they previously had. Does it bug you that Chris Evans is both Captain America and The Human Torch? Even though both Cap and the Fantastic Four technically inhabit the same Marvel universe? Usually I can manage – the fact that Indiana Jones and Han Solo are the same person is fine, but just occasionally something like that will make me double take and cause me to fall out of the story.

I can find no real reason why this happens in some cases, but not in others – Whedon, for example, re-uses actors all over the shop, but this tends not to faze me – the casting always seems pretty bang on, but then when Tonks got her kit off in season two of Game of Thrones it smashed that suspension of disbelief to tiny pieces. The fact that Johnny Depp has played Willy Wonka, Sweeney Todd, The Mad Hatter and Ichabod Crane somehow doesn’t faze me. Martin Freeman and Ian Holm are Bilbo Baggins at different stages of his life, and that I can handle, but the next time I see the prologue to Fellowship and Holm is playing Bilbo at the Freeman age, I get the feeling it’s gonna bug the shit outta me.

This mini-rumination has absolutely no point to it, but I’m intrigued as to the reason why sometimes particular casting choices just intrude on my enjoyment of the story, and sometimes they don’t.