Fantastic Four Director Reveals Purpose Behind Controversial Casting Decisions
The upcoming Fantastic Four movie has had a lot of hate thrown at it by fans. Most of it based on the casting of some of the key characters. Depending on how you see things, this will come off as either entirely justified, or completely ignorant.
Amidst all of this, director Josh Trank has explained in an interview with Hero Complex why he made his specific casting choices. His answer may surprise you in its simplicity. According to Trank, he simply didn’t want to retread old ground.
Trank stated: “It only speaks to the greatness of any story that has been told for decades or centuries that people still want to tell that story, but you can’t just keep telling it the same way over and over again. And I think it only helps the world to be more honest with young kids, to show them the world that they go walk outside and see.”
Producer Simon Kinberg also elaborated on this, and talked about how the casting of Jaime Bell as Ben Grimm helped show off the transformation into The Thing. Kinberg added: “It’s more dramatic when that character becomes a huge rock creature – that’s a bigger transformation. The notion of a working-class tough guy who’s been pushed around by his bigger brothers his whole life seemed like a more interesting character than the guy who started as a football player and just ended up being 4 inches taller.”
Now obviously this won’t change everyone’s mind about how the casting went down. Nor will it affect people’s opinion about the film. But maybe, just maybe, it’ll let you see what they were thinking when they did it.
Fantastic Four releases in theatres August 7th.