The Netflix Achewood Series That Almost Was, Part 2

Casting Roast Beef.

"Swing for the fences," Netflix said to us, regarding casting. 

At the outset of the project, Pen had casually suggested Ryan Gosling for Roast Beef, and Jack Black as Ray. From a great height, both choices made sense: Gosling could do nuanced, delicate, actual acting, and Black was magnetic, bombastic, larger-than-life. But after listening to substantial footage of each, neither was ultimately an exact fit. It surprised me to rule against such "star power," but knowing the characters as intimately as I do, and sensing I needed to do the most sincere possible production of this universe for the one shot I had here, we got back on the horn with Netflix's stellar casting director, Tyler. 

We subsequently auditioned a half-dozen actors for Roast Beef, looking for an actor who could twine an unvarnished rage with tremulous vulnerability and self-loathing. I am deeply enamored of Showtime's American adaptation of Shameless, and asked if we could get Jeremy Alan White, who played the self-destructive genius Lip Gallagher. Jeremy was too busy shooting The Bear, but we also liked Cameron Monaghan, who played Ian Gallagher, a character who struggles both with coming out as gay, and the onset of mental illness. Cameron gave a superb reading, but Tyler, in his wisdom, had us survey a variety of actors in the Cameron vein, and Noel Fisher's name came up. 

Noel had played Mickey Milkovich in Shameless. Mickey was a violent urchin from a filthy and lawless home, also closeted and self-loathing. The first time he appeared in the show, pallid and sooty and sociopathic, I was nervous that an actual piece of shit had wandered onto the Shameless set, and they were doing the best they could to capture him on film before he disappeared again. 

Throughout the course of Shameless's eleven seasons Fisher manages Mickey through a beautiful transformation, showing delicate mastery of the character. I was convinced had the talent and range to play Roast Beef. 

During our auditions with Noel he bonded strongly with the character, giving ever-better readings, and flexing to the left and right of the material in the way that shows a gratifying, full inhabiting. He could psychologically snap and yell with a rage that seemed too good, too rich, for animation; he delivered Beef's Hamlet-esque monologues of blackness and wishful annihilation in an inky subterranean tomb so solemn, a single drop of water would have resonated in great texture and duration. 

Noel's final rendition of the pilot episode, over the course of its half-hour duration, showed a carefully-measured amplitude of intensity. Beef would be even stronger, broader, thornier—acetone and matches on stage together—than I had ever imagined him throughout the course of the comic. This was another rite of passage for me: the moment when working with another artist exceeds and improves the source material. It was exhilarating. 

Next time: Casting Ray Smuckles. 

Fun Fact: We had to rewrite the dinner scene where an increasingly tipsy Sondra Smuckles admonishes Ray from entering the Great Outdoor Fight. Maria Bamford, who had read for Sondra originally, was no longer available, so Noel stepped in to read her "Southern belle Meryl Streep doddering through chablis #6" lines. It was a show-stealing delivery, and it was so authentically hilarious that I developed an entirely separate spinoff series wherein he could play her. Noel and I still write, and I have hopes this can eventually be pitched.