PrinceRilian90 wrote:My first choice would be Aiden Turner who played Kili in the hobbit movies, sure they were fantasy movies too, but he played a very different part. he's a good actor, who has a background in stage productions (he was in Romeo and Juliet). he definitely looks like he could be related to Ben Barnes, and he's in the right age range (33).
That's an interesting suggestion; I hadn't thought of him before. He certainly does look as though he could be related to Barnes! It's also good to hear that he has a stage background as well.
David West wrote:I think [aging Caspian up in VDT] works for a number of reasons.
1) Being nearly 80 makes Caspian's frailty instantly believable.
2) 20 years to having past since Rilian went missing makes for a more atmospheric, almost mythic long-cold mystery than a decade old disappearance does.
3) Rilian leaving with his father a sturdy middle aged warrior and returning to find him a frail, decrepit old man 20+ years later allows for far more poignant imagery in their flashback and reunion scenes than the change a mere decade would result in does.
4) Rilian's age here works well with Caspians, but still leaves him young enough to cut a handsome and heroic figure.
5) If the ages of the characters are merely implicit and not expressly stated in the film, Rilian being a 40-something man should throw off non-book-readers who hear the term "prince" and arbitrarily assume a very young man.
6) This timeline allows for the Queen to be a very beautiful woman in her early 40s when she dies, which is a more striking image than it would be if she was 55+ as in Lewis's timeline.
I like your reasoning here. It seems like it could be a net benefit for the film and I don't think even most purists would be very bothered by it.
Having Caspian be twenty years younger at the time of Rilian's disappearance would make his almost-violent confrontation with Drinian much more dramatic, and having Rilian be forty when our trio meets him could allow for casting another actor to play him if they have flashbacks to when he was in his youth. (Between that and his hair growing darker and his skin growing paler from being underground for so long, the audience may well be skeptical that it's actually the lost prince.) Plus, I also think that having a forty-year-old Rilian could potentially be more frightening than a thirty-year-old one; his ravings and threats might be more chilling coming from an older man. Since drama is associated with youth and reticence and steadiness tend to increase with age, it's arguably more disturbing when middle-aged people are acting very erratically.
That's an interesting anecdote about Lewis and the vegetables! I wouldn't be at all surprised if it's true, based on what I've read about his story planning.
Reepicheep775 wrote:Rilian's speaking style may seem like a minor detail, but to me it's one of those details that makes Narnia unique. An adaptation can be killed with a thousand shallow cuts. Each one seems like a minor detail, but when taken all together you've robbed the book of what makes it stand out.
This is very important to me as well. With so much of the book set outside of Narnia, Rilian's speech patterns are one of the few glimpses we get into Narnian culture. I really want him to sound as though this is the way he has spoken all of his life: completely effortless and natural. This is very necessary, too, because if the style of speaking isn't pulled off well, it could make or break his scene in the silver chair, as
narnia fan 7 said.