Complex Numbers

Butcher

Well this is a little less controversial than yesterday's prompt, but not much so.

PROMPT July 23rd

You've been given a full budget and creative license to bring a book you read to film. What book would you pick and who would you cast as the characters? If you choose a book with an existing movie adaptation, what changes would you make?

Plenty of books I could choose, but I'm going to go with the one I most recently read. Or actually the entire series of books, which is up to 16 now (soon to be 17). Also, I'm loosely interpreting "film" here; the line between movie and TV series is getting blurrier all the time, and with 17 books you need it to be a series.

I'm talking about Jim Butcher's Dresden Files, which has been going on for 20 years now.

SyFy (or, well, I think it was still The SciFi Channel at the time) did a short-lived series adaptation in 2007, but as far as I'm concerned that doesn't count. I've never seen it, anyway. So I'm ignoring it for these purposes.

For anyone who hasn't read the books (and you should, because one of them contains the greatest scene in all of literature), Harry Dresden is a wizard who lives in Chicago and gets himself into supernatural trouble on a regular basis, consorting with vampires, werewolves, faeries, etc. I figure since the show Supernatural is ending, this could fill the void with something actually, you know... good. The books combine elements of contemporary fantasy, noir detective, and comic book tropes.

Now, here's one problem for casting: time passes in the books. That is, the Harry Dresden from Storm Front is about 20 years younger than the Harry Dresden from the latest book, Peace Talks. So you either have to grab a 30 year old actor and age him up something close to naturally, or cast anyone and use de-aging tech, which has come a very long way in recent years. You did say "full budget," though, so I'm not letting age get in the way. Also, 50-year-old actors are going to be better known to me than 30-year-old actors. To complicate matters, some of the characters are supernatural and don't age much if at all. (The Witcher has this problem too.)

The most important character is, of course, Dresden himself. The books are written in his first-person point of view. I considered Henry Cavill, but he's too well-known as Superman and Geralt of Rivia, and I don't want to take him away from more Witcher series.

So for Harry Dresden, I'm going to go with Thomas Jane, who played a similar private-detective role (without the magic but with science fiction elements) on The Expanse.

Bob the Skull, Harry's sounding board at least at first, well, I'm going to go with Patton Oswalt because Oswalt is awesome. Probably limited to voice acting.

Karrin Murphy, a cop that eventually gets dragged into all the paranormal shit and becomes Harry's partner (in several senses of the word) -- well, I had to ask a friend about this, but Kristen Bell from The Good Place would be perfect.

Ebenezer McCoy is Dresden's mentor and (spoiler, sorry) grandfather, an old Scottish man. No, I'm not casting Sean Connery. I like Peter Capaldi, the 12th Doctor Who, for the role.

There are, like, a million other characters, as you'd expect for such a long series of novels. I mean, Mark Sheppard has to be in there somewhere because he's Mark Sheppard, but I don't know who he'd play.

In the end, though, I just want this to happen. I need this to happen. No matter who gets cast, as long as the series is as awesome as the books. Because polka will never die!