Has MGM Found Their New Carrie?
According to the Vulture.com, MGM has narrowed down their choice for the title role in their remake of Brian DePalma and Stephen King’s 1976 classic Carrie down to two actresses. The two main contenders for the part are said to be Chloe Moretz, better known to geeks as Hit Girl from Kick-Ass, and 24 year old Haley Bennett, who most people would only know from the movie The Haunting of Molly Hartley. Moretz is still only fifteen, so she hasn’t completely gotten over her awkward phase yet, which is a good thing. Bennett is a bit too sexy looking for Carrie White to me, and there is nothing I hate more than when Hollywood throws on a pair of glasses on an obviously sexy twenty something and musses up her hair, and suddenly expects us to buy that they are awkward outcast teenagers.
Some of the other actresses who tested for the part were Dakota Fanning, Emily Browning (Sucker Punch) Bella Heathcote (Dark Shadows) and Lily Collins (Mirror Mirror) In my opinion, each of these actresses is way too conventionally beautiful (and too old) to play the part of pale and awkward Carrie White, so I’m glad they were passed over. One of the big problems with so many of these horror remakes of classic movies is that every teenager looks like they are potential Victoria’s Secret or Abercrombie & Fitch models. Look at the original versions of Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street or Friday the 13th; the teens look like teens, some of them even have visible zits. Now they all look they came out of some weird factory that only makes perfect, chiseled people (this factory also supplies the CW Network with the cast for all their shows) Carrie needs to be someone who can look real, awkward, and believably seventeen.
The last tidbit from this article is the most interesting: It seems director Kimberly Pierce is looking for either Jodie Foster or Julianne Moore to play the part of Margaret White, Carrie’s crazy fundamentalist mother. Either of these choices raises my interest level for this project a thousand fold. After seeing her play another ultra conservative unbalanced mom in the form of Sarah Palin in Game Change, I could totally see Julianne Moore totally delivering in this part. Or it could also be a huge acting comeback for Jodie Foster, who hasn’t had a mainstream hit movie in almost a decade. Either choice at least give me partial hope this project won’t be total a waste of time. But whoever ends up in either part has rather huge shoes to fill, because Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie totally owned those roles.
