Why Can’t Americans Play Americans?
I’m a fan of each star who has been cast in “Genius,” the British director Michael Grandage’s upcoming movie about F. Scott Fitzgerald and the literary world of the 1920s and ’30s. But virtually the entire cast of characters — including Fitzgerald, editor Max Perkins and writer Thomas Wolfe — are to be played by non-Americans, with the handsome Guy Pearce (pictured) as Fitzgerald. There’s no way in hell that a movie about British literary lights of the 1920s — say, Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, and John Maynard Keynes — would be made with an American cast. And don’t talk to me about Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher: that was most definitely an exception.
