To industry outsiders, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ recent decision to add a Best Casting category seemed an odd choice. Though the casting process isn’t necessarily a mystery to most people, if they’ve ever experienced it firsthand it was probably auditioning for a school or local play. In these cases, they’re auditioning for the director, maybe the writer, and possibly a producer. There is no casting person present.
Obviously, anyone who’s ever watched a movie has surely become accustomed to seeing a casting credit during the opening credits, but how many people bother to Google the details of how casting on a feature film works? It’s not just a question of fit. It can get awfully political if an agent attempts to force an up-and-coming actor into a production, and has the leverage to do so because they represent bigger names. A whole host of factors can come into play when, ideally, you’re just trying to slot the perfect actor into the right part, while making sure they have a decent onscreen rapport with their co-stars.
And what happens when an actor has to suddenly drop out of a production? Sometimes, you start shooting a movie and realize you’ve made a mistake (see — or, rather, don’t see — Eric Stoltz as Marty McFly in “Back to the Future,” or Stuart Townsend as Aragorn in Peter Jackson’s “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy). Other times, life gets in the way.
In the case of Michael Biehn landing the role of Hicks in James Cameron’s “Aliens,” the guy ahead of him lost his part due to the long arm of the law.
Wanna shoot up a bunch of xenomorphs? Don’t do drugs!
The Marines of “Aliens” are, for the most part, a lunkheaded, gung-ho lot. Like most Marines on the cusp of combat, they’re amped up and ready for action. They’ve trained to kill, and all they ask is that you stay the hell out of their way and let them exterminate. In 1986, if you were casting a ruggedly handsome Marine with burgeoning leadership skills, you could’ve done a helluva lot worse than James Remar.
For the role of Hicks, however, would Remar really be your guy? This is the character who makes a flirty connection with Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley. He’s cocky, sure, but also has a sensitive side. Remar, whose most notable parts to date were as the attempted rapist Ajax in “The Warriors,” the psychopathic cop killer in “48 Hrs.”, and brutish mobster Dutch Schultz in “The Cotton Club,” would have seemed like dicey casting to me.
Fortunately, Cameron and his casting team never had to have a difficult conversation with Remar. He saved them the trouble by getting hit with a drug possession charge. They immediately went to their fallback guy, Biehn, who joined the other Marines in training, and turned out to be the right guy for a pivotal part in the “Alien” franchise — i.e. the guy Ripley almost falls in love with before he’s killed in emergency transit from the USS Sulaco to Fiorina “Fury” 161.
As for Remar, he bounced back and forth between cops and tough guys before landing the role of a lifetime in Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis,” where he exchanges a line or two of dialogue with Adam Driver before disappearing entirely from the movie.
