It's Marie Antoinette week: We're celebrating the Queen Consort of France each afternoon for a week for the 223rd anniversary of her death and the 10th anniversary of the Sofia Coppola biopic.
by Murtada
The casting in Marie Antoinette is imaginative and to die for. You could say it’s not hard to imagine Kirsten Dunst in the title role especially since she had already worked with Sofia Coppola. Jason Schwartzman as Louis XVI is not that far fetched since he’s the director’s cousin. However putting Rip Torn, Molly Shannon, Judy Davis and Asia Argento together in 1790s France took some chutzpah...
But where Coppola and her casting directors Antoinette Boulat and Karen Lindsay-Stewart prove their foresightedness is in the casting of three up and comers, Rose Byrne, Tom Hardy and Jamie Dornan. Years before Damages (2007), Bronson (2008) or Fifty Shades of Grey (2015) they were all in Marie Antoinette.
Byrne was arguably the most well known of the three at the time having already appeared in Troy (2004). So she gets the biggest part; Duchesse de Polignac a favorite of Marie Antoinette’s. Dornan plays Swedish Count and confirmed hottie Axel Fersen. We know whose eyes he catches at court. Hardy has the smallest part as a courtier who’s highly skeptical of Fersen.
This viewer didn’t leave the theatre in 2006 with a lasting impression of any of them. Except maybe how pretty Dornan looked. The queen was right to have an affair with him. Although now, watching again, Hardy’s petulance and jealousy, and Byrne’s conspiratorial snobbery are delicious. Particularly knowing what we know of their filmographies. Dornan is still so pretty and perfectly cast. No one knew 10 years ago that this trio would have Bane, Bulgarian clowns and Melanie Griffith's fantastic actress daughter in their future. Or that we’d be enjoying all three of them so much.
Did you recognize these three as the stars they are now back then?