Casting Against Expectations

Even before opening a book or before the beginning of a movie, we tend to have expectations for the lead - the hero, the protagonist, whatever word you wish to use. And in most cases, we are right. Because the authors, casting specialists, and movie directors also know what kind of hero we expect, they give us exactly what we think we want. But do we really want it?

Philosophically, they say that you are unfortunate to get what you want and in many ways that is true. Because once you have what you want, there’s no more dream to follow or ambition to work towards. And, sometimes, not getting what you want can be much more interesting and entertaining than getting exactly what you want. Because we not only know how the hero should look and act. We also know how the story will run with (usually) him at the helm. We know how an action movie will play out. We know how a romance story runs with its twists and turns not to make things too easy for the here usually female lead.

What happens, though, if we make the twist at the beginning? If we don’t choose the regular hero for whatever genre a story is set in? What if we play with that expectation and go in a different direction? A woman in the lead of an action story might not be quite as testosterone-driven as a man, but can’t she be a good lead, too? Her fighting might be different, but her situation doesn’t have to be less desperate.

Instead, we very dearly hang on to gender roles - we don’t even consider that a woman might star in an action movie or that a man might star in a romance. But why? Erotic novels with two men (and no woman) do very well with the female audience (also, presumably, with some men inclined that way). Why shouldn’t female characters also do well with a male audience? Not all moviegoers who went to see “Wonder Woman” were women, I’m sure.

Horror movies have the specific ‘slasher’ category, where the lead is usually the ‘final girl.’ The young woman who is virtuous, but nevertheless forced to go through hell to come out strong enough to face off the killer in the end. Compared to your usual horror movie, where women are more likely to be the victims than the final survivors and heroes, the slasher genre is unusual. In the first ‘real’ slasher movie, “Halloween” (although one could argue that, despite not featuring the female lead facing off Leatherface in the end, “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” was first), we have that twist for the first time. It’s not a man who faces off against the deadly killer. It’s not one of the boys. It’s a girl - the ‘virtuous’ girl, because horror movies are deeply moralistic. Carpenter turned things around. So did Joss Whedon ages later, when he conceived Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The blond cheerleader, who usually is among the first victims in every horror movie set in a high school setting, suddenly became the badass fighter killing the vampires. Buffy is not successful because she’s the virtuous girl. She’s a ‘chosen one’ - a trope which feels a little overused nowadays. Buffy is fated to be the Slayer and to fight vampires until she dies - only, Buffy refuses to stay dead, so tough luck for the vampire populace of L.A. and later on Sunnydale.

Espionage movies do feature female leads sometimes (please, please, please, let the slightly announce Black Widow standalone be good!), but they often have a huge problem in that case: sexualisation. The movies almost all play the female agent as the femme fatale type - she does her job by seducing, by using her body to gain information or entry. And while this is more realistically done by a woman, because few places and pieces of information are guarded by women, where a man would do better, it is also a very sexist trope - because the women don’t get to do other things. It’s rare to see a female agent simply doing stuff the way a male one would do it (my own agent Jane Browne notwithstanding, of course). Also, there’s often the rather dangerous trope of systemic abuse used to ‘train’ the female agents for their job, something you find especially strong in the background of Black Widow (the Red Room program) or the recent “Red Sparrow” flick. The problem is that, unlike the male agents who do it for patriotism (or, perhaps, money), the women have been broken and recreated to turn them into those human Venus flytraps. They are not shown as people who wanted to become agents and went through the training for this (Roxy from “Kingsman” is different, but not the lead, merely a side character). They were taken, often as children or under pressure, their will was broken, their morals erased, and they were turned into breathing weapons and tools for their superiors (who usually are men). Again, Jane is different there, as are her female colleagues (this advertising is brought to you by me).

Fantasy settings (and sci-fi to a degree) should, one might think, be easiest to fill with a lot of different heroes. We’re talking about places full of magic (or with technology so advanced it could just as well be magic) where everything is possible. But even there, most creators show us male heroes (usually both straight and white) who have male sidekicks and women mostly feature as princesses to rescue or as some kind of side character who is either destined to die for the hero’s motivation (hint: no matter the genre, just DON’T DO IT!) or just generally be around without any deeper reason. In the best case, especially in sci-fi, they’re some sort of neutral technician or magician, physically female, but never seen as a woman by the hero.

There are a lot of ways to cast against expectations. To give the reader or viewer a different hero to follow. When John Carpenter decided to have a woman face off against his killer in “Halloween,” he took a risk and created a new sub-genre. There is no reason why you shouldn’t put an unlikely character in the shoes of the hero. Just make sure they still have the necessary ability and drive for the problem you’ll have them face. But that is something you always need to keep an eye on.