#headcast

Cyril DePaul- Tom Hiddleston

Finn Lourdes - Eddie Redmayne

Guest cast for Dance With The Devil:

Anita Cortés: Anaïs Nin (she and her brief career as a psychoanalyst and her anxious repression of her own bisexuality inspired Anita)

Robert “Robbie” Stirling: Tom Hiddleston in innocent Classicist posh boy mode. So innocent he basically doesn’t realise he responds to men as well as women until Torsten Barring happens.

Sir Cyril Smythe: Claude motherfucking Rains in evil aristocratic bastard mode. Hollenius was a big inspiration, as some of you may have noticed. He’s not the exact same guy, however; Smythe is even worse and possesses no genius, just money. His evilness is not motivated by sexual jealousy, either; he’s just a sadistic, megalomaniac psycho through and through.

Acheron: Anthony Ainley (shut up) complete with Master beard (except slightly more muscular and hairy in this incarnation, so imagine he just hit the gym or something) and also in evil aristocratic bastard mode.

Birgitte: Jean Harlow at her most tragic. Birgitte’s IQ is closer to her shoe size, however.

I haven’t got a fixed face for Laura, so you can imagine whichever jailbait-seeming evil curvaceous blonde you wish. Fuckit, that was 2014. Somewhere between the second and third fics, I happened to discover this highly intelligent, precocious baby vamp of an actress from the exact same era who was more perfect than I could ever have imagined: Bonita Granville. She specialised in playing spoiled, even outright evil children, and nabbed an Oscar nomination for a harrowingly, astonishingly malicious little girl in These Three (she was just 12 years old at the time of filming, outperforming all the grown-ups; she really was robbed of that Oscar). It’s in 1938′s The Beloved Brat–an hour-long ‘family’ movie that was, in fact, shockingly dark for its themes–that she was at her Lauramost, to the point where I’m still pinching myself at how such a perfect match could ever even have existed. It’s in the public domain and you can grab it here. She also played Nancy Drew–but it’ll tell you something about her ‘edge’ that even this shot of her as Nancy looks somehow sinister:

More Lauraesque pictures of her here and here.

OTOH, no harm done if you can think of another actress who fits her while reading. It’s not like I can stop you! You can imagine whoever the hell you want as these people, really; whatever gets you off.

Ok, with one exception.

Torsten Barring is, forever and always, 100%, the 1941 original as portrayed by Conrad Veidt.

Tobias:

Donald Sutherland looks and behaves like the type of man who would father at least a Rickman-style version of Severus. Hell, I could even cast him as a much-older version of the potion master himself:

“...dear girl. Look at the amazing things going on.”

Does anyone else remember the episode titled “Dear Boy” in Buffy/Angel that was all Darla and Angel/us? The actor Rajkummar Rao has been Paris in my head for quite some time now. He is a wonderfully versatile guy, and has a special talent for playing entitled, toxic masculinities with bewildering innocence. Aishwariya Rai’s Helen is both “dear” and a “girl” and everything not. I remember the way that (I want to say Buffy?) episode was swallowed up by this madly intoxicating and insane and deeply codependent but at the same time independent people and how they ‘clung’. (The kink was, ahem, kinky and delightful). I don’t want to talk about neat, watertight binaries of absolutely active/passive, dominating/submissive, abuser/victim labels. They are tired, and reductive. And I REALLY don’t want to re-read Homer trying to support or refute any of it.