Casting Couch: John and Alfie from False Colors by Alex Beecroft, an Age of Sail m/m romance.
I like to pick an actor to embody each of my characters before I get very far on in writing them. It helps me to solidify what starts out as a very vague impression of how they look into a much more concrete picture.
With False Colors, naturally the writing was all done before it got a front cover, so while I’m extremely lucky, because the lads on the front cover of the book are very close to how I imagined, they aren’t the models I was originally using. If you’re interested, these are the actors I would have chosen to play the characters, if I’d had the choice. Having said that, I actually think John from the cover art is completely perfect. Alfie could do to look a little more roguish and charming.
So, in my imaginary blockbuster movie edition of ‘False Colors’, these are the actors I would cast for the parts:
Alfie – Damian O’Hare
John could not wrench his gaze away from Donwell’s face. Limned with gold, it was perfectly nondescript; round, pleasant, and completely lacking in self-conscious guilt. Donwell’s mouth quirked up at one side into a slow, charming smile.
John – Simon Woods
Cavendish gave another of those small smiles that stretched the skin over his cheekbones. He had lost a great deal of weight since the pirate incident, and had not been exactly heavy before that. If he was a skeleton, however, he was a very elegant one.
As usual, the hair colours are wrong, but that can always be fixed!
False Colors is due out on April 13th 2009 from Running Press, a subsidiary of Perseus Books.
And I’m *still* trying to restore my article about “muses”…
Excellent choices, of course. I find the question “whom would you cast in a movie” really difficult to answer; each character consists of so many different inspirations and influences.
Impatiently waiting for 13 April, but I guess you know that!
I find it very difficult to visualize faces, so finding someone with the right sort of face for the type of character I’m thinking of is a big step forward in making them solid to me. Though in fact now when I think of the lads, I think of them as the handsome young men from the cover
I’m just afraid that if I didn’t find someone to embody the character for me, they would end up visually very nebulous, because I find it so hard to ’see’ them in my imagination.
Hee! Thank you!