When the film rights to a popular book (or book series) are\u00a0sold, it isn’t uncommon to wonder who authors would cast for their books’ film counterparts. Sometimes, there are\u00a0specific actors the authors had in mind when developing a character. However, when it comes to\u00a0film adaptations of books<\/a>, it is rare for the original author to have any real say in the casting process. And even if they are able to make casting suggestions, there are myriad reasons why the studio, producer, or director might go in a different direction – money, availability, and box-office clout being just a few of the reasons that the author may not see their dream actor cast. In the end, if the author is\u00a0happy<\/a>\u00a0about how the movie turned out and about how their characters were portrayed, they may not care all that much about whether the filmmakers went with their preferred choice of actors.<\/p>\n Here are some of the actors who authors had in mind for characters based on\u00a0their\u00a0books. Vote up the preferred choices you think would have been a “dream” casting choice for these specific roles.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Over 2.3K Ranker voters have come together to rank this list of 11 Actors That Authors Had In Mind To Play Their Famous Characters<\/p>\n This list is<\/p>\n dynamically ranked<\/a><\/p>\n based on user voting. The order reflects the consensus of our voters and is not influenced by paid placements or editorial bias.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n <\/p>\n In Winston Groom’s novel\u00a0Forrest Gump, the title character is described as standing at\u00a06 feet 6 inches<\/a>\u00a0tall\u00a0and weighing 240 pounds – which is one reason why the author envisioned John Goodman as being the right actor to play the role in the film adaptation. But even though he felt that they removed many of the rough edges from the novel’s earthy and\u00a0cheerfully profane character, Groom told\u00a0The New York Times\u00a0in 1994 that he didn’t really have a problem with how the filmmakers adapted his story\u00a0or with Tom Hanks’s portrayal.<\/p>\n However, the author may not have been completely honest about his feelings about how the filmmakers treated his book,\u00a0as\u00a0Gump and Co., the follow-up novel which came out one year after\u00a0the film’s release, opens with,\u00a0“Take my word for it –\u00a0don’t never let<\/a>\u00a0nobody make a movie about your life\u2019s story. Whether they get it right or wrong, it don\u2019t matter.”<\/p>\n John Travolta was reportedly the filmmakers’ first choice to play Forrest, but he\u00a0passed<\/a>\u00a0 – a decision he admitted he regrets. Hanks, meanwhile, said that he agreed to take the part within\u00a0an hour and a half<\/a>\u00a0after\u00a0reading the script.<\/p>\n Regardless of Groom’s true feelings, the film adaptation of\u00a0Forrest Gump\u00a0was a huge box-office success and ended up winning five Academy Awards, including the ones for Best Picture and Best Actor (Hanks).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/li>\n <\/p>\n Roald Dahl’s 1964 children’s novel,\u00a0Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,\u00a0is widely considered to be a\u00a0classic. Among its many accolades,\u00a0it was named one of the\u00a0100 Best Young Adult Books<\/a>\u00a0of All Time by\u00a0Time\u00a0magazine.<\/p>\n Although he had no real say in the casting choices, Dahl’s first choice to portray Wonka in the film adaptation of his novel was English comedian Spike Milligan.\u00a0Dahl claimed\u00a0Milligan was excited to take on the role, to the point of shaving off his beard to do a screen test, Donald Sturrock (author of\u00a0Storyteller: The Life of Roald Dahl)\u00a0told Yahoo!\u00a0in 2016. But the film company passed on casting either Milligan or Dahl’s second choice, Peter Sellers – who reportedly\u00a0called Dahl personally<\/a>\u00a0in a bid to land\u00a0the part –\u00a0\u00a0claiming that both men were too weird for the role.<\/p>\n Dahl was not happy when Gene Wilder landed the role. “I think he felt Wonka was a very British eccentric,\u201d\u00a0Sturrock told Yahoo!\u00a0\u201cGene Wilder was rather too soft and didn\u2019t have a sufficient edge. His voice is very light, and he\u2019s got that rather cherubic, sweet face. I think [Dahl] felt there was\u00a0something wrong<\/a>\u00a0with [Wonka\u2019s] soul in the movie –\u00a0it just wasn\u2019t how he imagined the lines being spoken.”<\/p>\n Sturrock wrote in\u00a0Storyteller: The Life of Roald Dahl\u00a0that the author never liked the completed film – which he called “crummy” – and thought that Wilder’s performance was “pretentious<\/a>” and “bouncy.” Critics didn’t seem to agree with the author, as the film received generally positive reviews, and Wilder received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor for his performance.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/li>\n <\/p>\n Of all the actors who have played the suave and charismatic spy onscreen, Sean Connery is\u00a0widely regarded<\/a>\u00a0as being the best James Bond. But author Ian Fleming was less than impressed when the actor was chosen to be the first person to play Bond on film (in\u00a01962’s\u00a0Dr. No) – although he never said this to the actor’s face. Connery claimed that Fleming thought of him as “an overdeveloped\u00a0stuntman<\/a>.”<\/p>\n According to Richard Maibaum, who adapted several of Fleming’s Bond novels for the screen, the author would have preferred David Niven, who had the type of look and feel that Fleming envisioned in Bond, to play the role.<\/p>\n “Fleming thought David Niven would have made\u00a0a great<\/a>\u00a0James Bond,\u201d Maibaum told film historian Patrick McGilligan, \u201cbut David Niven wasn\u2019t all that physical.” The actor himself turned down the chance to play the part, feeling that he was\u00a0too old<\/a>\u00a0to do it justice. Strangely, Niven did end up playing Bond years later, in the 1967 film\u00a0Casino Royale.<\/p>\n Fleming did end up appreciating Connery’s portrayal of Bond enough that in his later novels, he gave Bond a working-class\u00a0Scottish heritage<\/a>\u00a0similar to Connery’s own. Neither\u00a0Dr. No\u00a0nor Connery’s performance as Bond was particularly well-received in the film’s initial reviews, although critical opinion has improved with time.\u00a0Dr. No\u00a0did do well at the box office, and Connery went on to play Bond six more times.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/li>\n <\/p>\n When the film adaptation of\u00a0Breakfast at Tiffany’s\u00a0was first released, some critics pointed out that the chic, waifish, European-born\u00a0Audrey Hepburn was the wrong choice to play a young girl from the rural Midwest whose original name was Lula Mae Barnes, even if the girl had run away from her upbringing and reinvented herself as the outwardly sophisticated New Yorker, Holly Golightly.<\/p>\n Author Truman Capote was unhappy about Hepburn’s casting, as he had envisioned Marilyn Monroe in the part. Even though Monroe was from California –\u00a0not Texas –\u00a0there were many\u00a0similarities<\/a>\u00a0between the actress’s life and that of Golightly:\u00a0Just as the fictional character goes from uneducated farm girl to New York party girl, Monroe reinvented herself – once a teenaged bride named\u00a0Norma Jeane Baker, she became a famous actress and sex symbol. The two women were both exploited by and helped by older men in their attempt to escape their lives. Eerily, Capote even seems to have predicted Monroe’s tragic passing (which occurred a few years after\u00a0Breakfast at Tiffany’s\u00a0was published). In the novella, the Hollywood agent who helps to transform Golightly describes her as “strictly a girl you’ll read where she ends up at the bottom of a bottle of Seconals.”<\/p>\n Monroe reportedly was eager to play the role, but her acting coach Paula Strasberg urged her not to play a part that Strasberg considered immoral. There was also a question about whether Monroe’s studio (20th Century Fox) would have lent her to Paramount Pictures for the film. When the studio decided to go with Hepburn in the role, Capote\u00a0stated that “Paramount\u00a0double-crossed<\/a>\u00a0me in every way and cast Audrey. She was just wrong for that part.”<\/p>\n The author hated the film as a whole, believing it had softened – or prettied up – the novella’s original plot. But despite his distaste for it, the film was a box-office success and earned five Academy Award nominations, including one for Hepburn as Best Actress (the award went to Sophia Loren for her performance in the film\u00a0Two Women).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Ranked #<\/p>\n 4<\/p>\n by<\/p>\n 1,082<\/p>\n voters with<\/p>\n an<\/p>\n 80<\/p>\n % upvote rate<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/li>\n <\/p>\n Director Stanley Kubrick reached out to Stephen King about adapting the author’s novel into a film, but the author was not happy with either of the director’s final choices to play the lead roles. He envisioned the role of Wendy as a blond, former cheerleader type who had never had to deal with any sort of trouble in her life, while he thought Shelley Duvall was an emotionally vulnerable type who seemed like she had gone through a lot\u00a0– in other words, the opposite of how he envisioned the character.<\/p>\n As for the role\u00a0of Jack Torrance, King unsuccessfully attempted to talk Kubrick out of casting Jack Nicholson, instead suggesting\u00a0Jon Voight<\/a>\u00a0or Michael Moriarty. The author felt that the storyline would have more\u00a0dramatic punch if the audience saw a more “normal-looking” man descend into madness. And his opinion about Nicholson being the wrong choice for the role hasn’t changed. In 2016, he told\u00a0Deadline:<\/p>\n The character of Jack Torrance has no arc in that movie. Absolutely no arc at all. When we first see Jack Nicholson, he\u2019s in the office of Mr. Ullman, the manager of the hotel, and you know, then, he\u2019s crazy as a s***\u00a0house rat. All he does is get crazier. In the book, he\u2019s a guy who\u2019s struggling with his sanity and finally loses it. To me, that\u2019s a tragedy. In the movie, there\u2019s no tragedy because there\u2019s\u00a0no real change<\/a>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n King was not happy with the completed film as a whole. He thought it lacked substance, comparing it to “a fancy car\u00a0without an engine<\/a>.” The initial reviews seemed to agree, praising the visuals while finding fault with the story. Although\u00a0The Shining\u00a0was successful at the box office, it differed from each of Kubrick’s previous eight directorial efforts\u00a0in that it failed to earn even a single Academy Award\u00a0nomination.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Ranked #<\/p>\n 5<\/p>\n by<\/p>\n 1,140<\/p>\n voters with<\/p>\n a<\/p>\n 77<\/p>\n % upvote rate<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/li>\n <\/p>\n Richard Matheson’s\u00a01954 post-apocalyptic horror novel,\u00a0I Am Legend,\u00a0has received three film adaptations to date:\u00a0The Last Man on Earth\u00a0(1964),\u00a0The Omega Man\u00a0(1971), and\u00a0I Am Legend\u00a0(2007). The first of these adaptations starred Vincent Price as Dr. Robert Morgan. (In the novel, the lead character is named Robert Neville\u00a0and is a plant worker, not a scientist.)\u00a0Matheson did not agree with casting Price in the lead.<\/p>\n “Vincent Price was a wonderful actor who did marvelous performances for the films I wrote for American-International. He was\u00a0miscast<\/a>\u00a0in\u00a0The Last Man on Earth,\u00a0however,” the author said in an interview for the unreleased book,\u00a0The Last Man on Film: Adaptations of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend. Matheson added that, at the time\u00a0The Last Man on Earth\u00a0was being cast, he thought Jack Palance\u00a0would have been a good choice to play the lead role.<\/p>\n Matheson was not happy with either\u00a0The Last Man on Earth\u00a0or\u00a0The Omega Man. He thought the former was more faithful to his novel\u00a0but called the finished project\u00a0“inept.” He was so disappointed with the film that instead of his real name, he used the pen name Logan Swanson for his screenwriting credit.<\/p>\n In an interview that is included in\u00a0the 1991 book,\u00a0Science Fiction Stars and Horror Heroes: Interviews with Actors, Directors, Producers, and Writers of the 1940s Through 1960s, Matheson suggested that if George Miller were\u00a0the director and\u00a0Harrison Ford<\/a>\u00a0the star, his novel could be made into a wonderful film.<\/p>\n
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