- Matthew Settle, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, 1997. Now 26, the ETstar tried out for Will Benson inwhat Chicago critic Roger Ebert said assembled all “the building blocks of idiot-proof slasher movies: Stings, Snicker-Snacks, false alarms and point-of-view baits-and-switches.”
- Vince Vaughn, Psycho, 1997.
By 1990, Anthony Perkins had played Norman Bates four times. So why should anyone else play him? It’s been (over)done. It’s a classic. And by The Master. Why re-make Hitchcock? Ah, beg pardon, Gus Van Sant called it a reproduction. A bizarre (lazy!) notion of copying – the Psycho script, word for word, action for action, move for move, shock for shock (except the shocks were too famous to shock anymore). “Just shoot it in color and have, for instance, Jack Nicholson play the detective and Timothy Hutton play Norman Bates,” he suggested. “Universal wanted to rope me in, and I said: “Here’s the idea: don’t change anything! It’s never been done before. Isn’t that a great reason to try it?” Not really! What had he said about re-makes? “The essence is missing. You might as well make an original movie.” Right! “One guy in particular has an extreme Tony Perkins quality – Robert Sean Leonard,” Van Sant told Movieline’s Stephen Rebello. “ So do… Henry Thomas and Jeremy Davies. [Indeed, Thomas was the teenage Bates in Psycho IV: The Beginning, 1989]. I think of MattDamon for everything I do… But he’s one of those under-30 guys who just didn’t get it. Leonardo would have been fantastic. I knew he knew that he could step into it. But I also knew he didn’t really want to do it. I seriously considered Joaquin Phoenix. He was interested… but busy. So, it was either wait or forge ahead and we forged ahead. Vince was not even in my imagination… But he had a really interesting quality I wasn’t expecting.”The UK’s fast-rising Christian Bale and DiCaprio pal, Tobey Maguire, were also short-listed.
Birth year: Death year: Other name: Casting Calls: 2