Casting backlash: Adaptations of beloved books or stories don’t belong to the loudest fans

How did we get to this?

After weeks of digital hand-wringing from a segment of the very invested and very opinionated Emily Henry fandom, the romance novelist has had to step in and intervene.

What was the fire that needed dousing? Hair colour.

To backtrack. Recently, Phoebe Dynevor and Patrick Schwarzenegger were cast as the leads for an upcoming movie adaptation of one of Henry’s book, Beach Read. It’s the one about two hot people who start off being prickly to each other and then eventually fall in love – who are we kidding, that’s every Henry book.

All the same, Schwarzenegger was really excited, and personally thanked Henry in his Instagram post accompanying the announcement. He even wrote, “I will do everything possible to make the fans happy and proud, and bring your brilliant writing to life”.

But the fans were not happy. Oh, no siree. And they let it be known.

They did not want Schwarzenegger as the male protagonist, Gus. It spawned a hashtag (#NotMyGus) and BookTok went off. He’s too preppy. He’s not sad boy enough. He’s not brunette.

This before a single frame of film had been shot. Probably before even the costume, hair and make-up tests had been done.

Perhaps these protesting fans had not heard of movie magic, where artisans and craftspeople for more than a hundred years have been turning humans into creatures from the black lagoon and preppy blondes into dark-haired emos. It can be done.

As for the vibes thing? Well, it’s called acting, isn’t it.

Henry was on the American Today show this week and defended the casting choice.

“It is our baby – the readers’ and my baby – but it’s also the filmmakers’ baby and the studio’s baby, and I’m along for the ride with the readers and we just have to trust the vision.”

She added praise for the movie’s writer-director Yulin Kuang, “I think she’s going to do an amazing job”.

Kuang had previously had to step in to publicly barrack for Schwarzenegger, and explained that he may not physically resemble the Gus described in the books but that he had been picked because he had “electric” chemistry with Dynevor.

That’s the thing. A movie adaptations is an entirely different medium to the book, even if they are both storytelling forms. The demands of what’s on the page to what’s on the screen are not the same.

Take the chemistry quotient Kuang had mentioned. You can write chemistry in a book, but you can’t fake it with two actors who have none, well, you can’t always fake it anyway.

You know it when you see it, especially when it’s in abundance. Glen Powell and Zoey Deutch in Set it Up? Sizzle! Glen Powell and Sydney Sweeney in Anyone But You? Fizzle.

In most situations, adaptations need to be able to exist as its own thing, even if it comes from beloved source material. Henry’s books are far (far, far, far) from literary masterpieces but they are frothy and easy-to-read with a dedicated fandom.

It’s not wrong for them to demand a certain level of fidelity, but if you get too hung up on details, you miss whether the transformation succeeds on the most fundamental point: emotional truth.

Too often fandoms have been disproportionately vocal while demanding that any screen adaptation follow exactly what they had envisioned based on a close reading. Or that it doesn’t match up with the dream casting online discourse.

For Beach Read, the online fandoms have been wishing for the likes of Paul Mescal, Dev Patel, Logan Lerman and Joe Keery. No offence, but Mescal and Patel aren’t doing a Beach Read movie, those two thesps are working at another level.

At least the Beach Read casting debate is just kind of trivial, and Schwarzenegger from his bubble of heterosexual white male nepo-baby privilege can probably cope with the backlash.

Robert Pattinson survived just fine despite the pearl-clutching response from some Twilight fans when he was announced to play Edward in the movies. They had been petitions demanding the producers take it back, which had attracted tens of thousands of signatures.

But there have been far more pernicious examples of casting angst that play into ugly culture war battles.

Just last week, Elon Musk and the deranged right lost their fragile little minds when it was revealed that Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o’s role in Christopher Nolan’s upcoming The Odyssey was of Helen of Troy.

Nyong’o couldn’t possibly represent the most beautiful woman in the world whose absconding or abduction triggered the Trojan War, these detractors stropped.

Again and again for days on end, Musk and his cronies accused Nolan and Hollywood of being woke for casting a black woman as Helen. Musk said Nolan’s only motive was to win an Oscar.

One right-wing influencer called the move “racism against white people”. Many of the posts had side-by-side images of Nyong’o and blonde German actor Diane Kruger, who played the role in the 2004 movie Troy – obviously forgetting that that film was actually quite terrible.

They also compared Brad Pitt, who played Achilles, to trans actor Elliot Page, who is not actually confirmed to portray Achilles in The Odyssey.

Some of the posts were outright racist or transphobic while others are only implying it, and sometimes these “debates” are a bad-faith opportunity to do only that.

The result is the same, to spread a narrative that marginalised communities have no right to be represented in mainstream stories or that a black woman could possibly be considered the most beautiful woman in the world.

The idea that Helen of Troy was “historically” white is absurd. She is a myth, she didn’t exist. According to the tales, she was born from an egg, and her father was Zeus, who seduced her mother Leda when he was in swan form. How do you “accurately” cast that?

The same thing happened when black actor Halle Bailey was cast as Ariel in the live-action/CGI remake of The Little Mermaid. Bailey and Disney were subject to mountains of racist commentary and backlash, completely overlooking the fact that mermaids are make-believe and not “historically” white redheads.

Paapa Essiedu earlier this year revealed he had received multiple death threats over him being cast as Professor Snape in the forthcoming Harry Potter TV adaptation. The role had been played by Alan Rickman in the 2001 to 2011 movies.

Essiedu is actually much closer in age to the book version of Snape than Rickman was - Essiedu is 35, Snape was 31 or 32 in the first book, and Rickman was 54 or 55 during production of Philosopher’s Stone.

Many of those opposed to Essiedu’s casting has pointed to descriptions in the books that Snape was “sallow-skinned” as if that was vindication for their complaints.

Some of the more “good faith” arguments against changing Snape’s ethnicity seems to hinge on the idea that if Snape was black, then that changes the dynamic of the bullying he received at the hands of James and Sirius when they were in high school.

Perhaps that will be part of the story, perhaps it won’t, but it’s not out of the realm of possibility that a TV series made in the 2020s and 2030s might want to explore that even if it wasn’t originally in the books written between 1997 and 2007.

Adaptations don’t have to be exactly the same as the source material. In fact, they probably shouldn’t be – otherwise, why make them at all other than for money?

Each adaptation becomes its own thing with its own context, and needs to reflect the time and the people who have formed a new relationship to it – and that includes the fans, some of whom might discover it for the first time when they sit down in a cinema or press play at home.

Books, TV shows and movies don’t belong to whoever found it first.