- Hilary Swank, The Black Dahlia, 2005. The end of Brian De Palma! He took James Ellroy’s masterpiece and chopped it up as badly as the poor 1947 victim of a mutilation murder in LA, unsolved to this day. Admittedly, what we saw was Universal’s cut of De Palma’s cut. but he still messed with the book and bizarre casting – such as selecting Swank over Bilson, Fairuza Balk, Kate Beckinsale and Eva Green as the femme fatale caught between two cops. Rolling Stone critic Peter Travers buried the film.“De Palma throws everything at the screen, but almost nothing sticks.”The tragedy is that David Fincher gave up his three hour, black-white plan when convinced he could never make it exactlyas he saw it in his head.
- Adrianne Palicki. Wonder Woman, TV, 2011. The DC comicbook heroine had not been seen on screens since Lynda Carter ended her four year reign on ABC in 1979. Time then, said Warner, for a new movie. DC’s testosterone duo, Batman and Superman, had cleaned up, now it up to the beautiful superhuman Amazon warrior Princess Diana of Themysacira, her Lasso of Truth, her indestructible bracelets and (honest) her invisible plane. With who…? Across a decade of plans by producers as diverse as Joel Silver (so wrong) and Joss Whedon (so right), 24 beauties were in the frame: from Madonna to Whedon’s favourite, Cobie Smulders. Then, the film morphed into an updated TV series by David E Kelley – that, too, was dead after the rushed pilot. Palicki was the sole actress considered for TV – she was previously seen by George Miller for WW in his aborted Justice League, in 2008. And Bilson lost her again in…
- -Gal Gadot, Wonder Woman, 2016. On Warner shelves for a full decade (not helped by David Kelley’s disastrous 2011 TVersion), spinning through numerous directors, the demi-goddess daughter of Zeus, eventually became the Israeli Gadot. “Very different,” she said, “from the experienced, super-confident, grown-up woman”she’d teaser-trailed that year in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, 2015. Her rivals for the DC Extended Universe included Bilson, Mischa Barton, Kate Beckinsale, Jessica Biel, Sandra Bullock in 2001 (and for the 2011 tele-film), Bollywood’s Priyanka Chopra in 2006, US wrestling star Chyna, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Eva Green, Mad Men’s busty Christina Hendricks (Nicolas Winding Refn’s choice), Angelina Jolie in 2001 (ten years later she was asked to direct), Cobie Smulders (WW’s voice in The Lego Movie, 2013), Kristen Stewart. The final trio, auditioning in November 2013, were Olga Kurylenko, Elodie Yung and… Gadot.
Birth year: Death year: Other name: Casting Calls: 3