Duaner said:
In these days when we get 4 or 5 superhero movies a year plus countless other sequels, prequels, and reboots of major franchises, it makes it more difficult to find actors/actresses who haven't had a part in one or more of them.
It's difficult only if that's all you're looking at.
But my secondary point is that all of those guys you mentioned, triple-series Pegg aside, are leads. They're serious actors, but they're very familiar faces, which is not this series's MO.
Television. Indies. Non-American film. Theater. I think those avenues offer a lot more potential. They're also, not incidentally, where a number of the folks you mentioned achieved their good names.
<I>Star Wars</I> has always been cast differently than Indiana Jones, with a lot more interest in recognizable actors; <I>Raiders</I> didn't have anyone like Alec Guinness or Peter Cushing in it. It's biggest name actor, after Ford, is someone who became famous later, Alfred Molina. (Amrish Puri, for what it's worth, also
Connery was a piece of stunt casting, but it worked, and it was appropriate in that case if it was ever going to be so; this astounding guy in the hat had to come from <I>someone</i> of similar stature.
We saw some shift in Crystal Skull, with Shia Labeouf looking like someone who was going to have a big career. (He still might: he's not retired, he's just not anchoring megaplex product anymore.) Broadbent and Winstone have led projects, but they're basically character actors. Blanchett's a trickier case: she's of star stature, generally playing lead roles, but without a star persona; she's a character actress, one who often disappears into roles, as with her Kate Hepburn. She wasn't playing a version of herself or her usual film persona (if she has one) as Spalko, and whatever weight the character has isn't dependent on it being Cate Blanchett (as is, I think, what we might initially expect with Connery).
To choose two handy examples, I think we might look more at <I>Star Wars</I>, and <I>The Force Awakens</I> in particular, as a model, over the Chris Nolan, 1960s epic strategy of filling every role with a big name.
<I>The Force Awakens</I> has:
3 returning cast members with faces, one of whom is a star, the other two of whom have established comfortable niches for themselves.
2 relative unknowns in the lead roles, one with few credits of note and the other with a performance in a small European action film with a flashy concept.
3 recently established buzzy actors, one who'd recently played lead in some well-reviewed films, one a deserving Oscar winner who built her career in Kenyan tv (and doesn't show her face in the film), and one who's mostly known for his supporting role on a buzzy tv series.
Christie is known for an astonishingly popular fantasy tv series; Serkis is doing his traditional mo-cap thing. Domnhall Gleeson has lots of strong supporting credits, but as a non-Potter viewer, his face wasn't recognizable to me.
Get one of the leads of <I>The Americans</I>, Keri Russell or Matthew Rhys. Get someone like Riz Ahmed, who was so good in <I>Nightcrawler</I>, and has now moved onto <I>Rogue One</I> and the next Bourne movie. Have Timothy Spall be some dusty old bookseller in a declining imperial outpost. Get someone most of us have never heard of but has been doing stellar work in Nigeria or Thailand or South Korea or Turkey or India, somewhere with a thriving national cinema. Feel free to cast from more familiar cinemas like France, Spain, Japan, etc.
The villain of every Indy film so far has been played by someone born either in the United Kingdom (Freeman and Glover), in part of the British Empire (Puri), or in a nation with a shared monarch and not-yet-full sovereignty (Blanchett). Maybe that streak can be broken, at least?