In nearly three days, nearly 55,000 people have signed a Change.org petition for the Fifty Shades of Grey movie to be recast. Brilliant idea! Hollywood executives always take online polls into account after they’ve already publicly announced the lead actors for a massively popular blockbuster movie.
Specifically, the petition wants current Fifty Shades stars Charlie Hunnam and Dakota Johnson to be replaced by Matt Bomer and Alexis Bledel, who were fan favorites from the start. As the petition’s original author explains on Change.org:
Matt Bomer is the PERFECT DESCRIPTION OF CHRISTIAN GREY AND ALEXIS BLEDEL IS THE PERFECT ACTRESS TO REPRESENT ANASTASIA STEELE and if THEY ARE NOT, NOBODY WILL BE And I read the whole trilogy and I can assure that Matt is the perfect actor for this movie and Alexis too. So please PLEASE, all of the GREYsessed and Bomerettes in the world NEED those actors. They always will be for us the Christian Grey and Anastasia Steele. WE CAN DO ANYTHING GUYS, ANYTHING.
While the fan reactions to this week’s casting announcement were decidedly mixed, few people were expecting this level of active campaigning against the casting. Which makes it kind of sad that there’s basically zero chance that the people behind the Fifty Shades movie are going to pay one iota of attention to this petition.
Here are a few reasons why:
1) Since the target audience for the movie is fans of the Fifty Shades books, the filmmakers definitely knew about fan favorite actors like Matt Bomer, Ian Somerhalder, Nina Dobrev, and Alexis Bledel already. And yet for whatever reason, they still didn’t cast them.
2) While most people remember Alexis Bledel from her days in Gilmore Girls, she is now ten years too old to play Anastasia, a virginal, 21-year-old undergraduate.
3) Not only do Bomer’s Wikipedia and IMDb pages suggest that he has a pretty busy schedule filming White Collar and other commitments, but he’s also a dad. No one with youngish children was ever going to sign up for Fifty Shades, because it means signing up for a lifetime of uncomfortable sex questions during publicity interviews. As a result, your kids would almost certainly rebel against your Embarrassing Dad-isms by leaving home at 15 to join a hyperconservative cult.
4) Although it’s comforting to know that Fifty Shades fans don’t care about the sexuality of the actor playing Christian Grey, Matt Bomer is openly gay. And Hollywood is still way too homophobic to cast a gay guy as the leading man in an erotic romance movie.
5) Did anyone ask either of the actors if they actually like the Fifty Shades books? Well, nothing from Bledel yet, but Matt Bomer has just released a polite but firm statement saying that he’s “looking forward to seeing the movie with Charlie and Dakota.”
Oh, and Fifty Shades producer Dana Brunetti has already weighed in on Twitter, pointing out that fan-casting is very different from casting a real movie. Sorry guys, but it’s probably not going to happen.
Photo via itsoktobegay101/Tumblr
