Ever since the cast for the upcoming Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City movie was first revealed last year, there has been plenty of discussion about the fact that director Johannes Roberts chose not to cast directly for a visual comparison to the characters as they appear in the video games. If you were to give full benefit of the doubt, it is because Avan Jogia, who plays Leon S. Kennedy in the movie, and Hannah John-Kamen, who plays Jill Valentine in the movie, are do not resemble the models for the game characters they portray on the screen. As part of a recent interview, Roberts went into detail on the casting of Jill and Leon, and what specifically he hoped to achieve through the casting.
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“It was hugely important with the whole casting process to find people who embodied the spirit and energy of the characters I wanted to portray,” Roberts told IGN. “I think often in game adaptations one of the big flaws can be just casting someone to look visually like the characters – giving them the identical haircut and clothes but not really trying to give the audience the thing that a movie does better than a game – which is to create a three-dimensional character that you can really connect with and believe in. I think as I said before one of the traps of falling into game adaptations is to make it feel like a giant cosplay version of the game.”
“Our cast is obviously much more diverse than the original games but I wanted to resist the trap of just casting because someone just happened to look like their character identically,” he continued. “We actually had a lot of actors who came in and recreated themselves perfectly visually as the character they were reading – it was uncanny at times ha! – but it was not what I felt this story needed. With Jill, I knew Hannah from Ready Player One and this show she was in at the time called The Stranger and I just knew she’d be perfect. Leon was much harder. We must have seen so many people – it was really quite a tricky role because of the balance of humor and weariness. Then Avan read and I was like he’s the one! He gets it.”
Here’s the synopsis for Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, in case you missed it:
“Once the booming home of pharmaceutical giant Umbrella Corporation, Raccoon City is now a dying Midwestern town. The company’s exodus left the city a wasteland…with great evil brewing below the surface. When that evil is unleashed, the townspeople are forever…changed…and a small group of survivors must work together to uncover the truth behind Umbrella and make it through the night.”
As noted above, Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City is scheduled to release on November 24th. The movie was written and directed by Johannes Roberts and stars Kaya Scodelario as Claire Redfield, Hannah John-Kamen as Jill Valentine, Robbie Amell as Chris Redfield, Tom Hopper as Albert Wesker, Avan Jogia as Leon S. Kennedy, Nathan Dales as Brad Vickers, Marina Mazepa as Lisa Trevor, and Neal McDonough as Dr. William Birkin. You can check out all of our previous coverage of the upcoming Resident Evil movie reboot right here.
What do you think about what we have seen of the upcoming Resident Evil movie so far? Are you excited to see Jogia as Leon and John-Kamen as Jill? Let us know in the comments, or feel free to reach out and hit me up directly over on Twitter at @rollinbishop to talk about all things gaming!
