The cast
The adaptation of Liz Jensen's novel is led by 4 actors: Aiden Longworth as Louis Drax, Jamie Dornan as the coma specialist Dr Allan Pascal, Sarah Gadon as the boy's mother Natalie Drax, and Aaron Paul as his father Peter Drax. Oliver Platt, Molly Parker, Barbara Hershey and Julian Wadham fill out the supporting roles. The ensemble was assembled between August and October 2014, and shooting finished in December of that year.
Who plays whom
Who plays whom is short enough to set out in full, and the parts are more unevenly weighted than a cast list suggests: 2 of the leads spend most of the film unconscious or absent.
| Actor | Role | Position in the film |
|---|---|---|
| Aiden Longworth | Louis Drax | Title role and narrator, largely from a hospital bed |
| Jamie Dornan | Dr Allan Pascal | The coma specialist the camera follows |
| Sarah Gadon | Natalie Drax | The mother, and the film's account of the clifftop |
| Aaron Paul | Peter Drax | The missing father, present mainly in flashback |
| Oliver Platt | Dr Perez | The child psychologist who saw Louis before the fall |
| Molly Parker | Dalton | The detective running the search for Peter |
| Barbara Hershey | Violet | Supporting |
| Julian Wadham | Dr Janek | Supporting, medical |
| Jane McGregor | Sophie | Supporting |
The order in which the parts were filled is public record. Jamie Dornan was announced in August 2014, Aaron Paul and Sarah Gadon in September 2014, and Oliver Platt, Molly Parker, Barbara Hershey and Aiden Longworth in October 2014, immediately before principal photography began in British Columbia on 27 October.
What Jamie Dornan was cast against
Jamie Dornan was cast against the 2 roles that had made him known, and the film needs the audience not to be thinking about either. He had played the serial killer Paul Spector in the BBC Two series The Fall from 2013, and Christian Grey in Fifty Shades of Grey in 2015. Dr Allan Pascal is neither a threat nor an object: he is the reasonable professional through whom the audience is meant to assess everyone else, and the plot works only while the audience trusts his judgement more than it should.
Aaron Paul was cast against a comparable weight. He had spent 5 seasons as Jesse Pinkman in Breaking Bad from 2008 to 2013 and won 3 Primetime Emmy Awards for it, which is to say he arrived carrying maximum audience sympathy. Peter Drax uses exactly that. The character is accused, absent and unheard for most of the running time, and the film relies on the viewer's reluctance to believe the worst of him.
The part that had to be believed: Sarah Gadon as Natalie
Sarah Gadon's part had to be believed absolutely for the film's structure to hold. She came to the film from 3 David Cronenberg pictures, A Dangerous Method in 2011, Cosmopolis in 2012 and Maps to the Stars in 2014, and from Denis Villeneuve's Enemy in 2013; the year after Louis Drax she took the lead in Alias Grace, the CBC adaptation of Margaret Atwood's novel, and won a Canadian Screen Award for it. Natalie Drax is the sole surviving witness to the clifftop, and the police procedural, the doctor's involvement and the audience's reading of the boy all rest on her account of it.
The boy the film is named after
The boy is played by Aiden Longworth, who was cast in October 2014 and carries both the title role and the voice-over. The demand is unusual: the character is inert on screen for most of the film and continuous on the soundtrack, so the performance runs almost entirely in the narration, in flashback, and in the coma sequences. Reviewers who disliked the film's shifts of tone tended to exempt the narration, which is the closest thing the adaptation has to Liz Jensen's prose voice.
What the supporting bench brings
The supporting bench brings a quantity of established screen credit that a small thriller does not usually carry. Barbara Hershey twice won the best actress prize at Cannes, for Shy People in 1987 and A World Apart in 1988, took an Emmy and a Golden Globe for A Killing in a Small Town in 1990, and was nominated for an Academy Award for The Portrait of a Lady in 1996. Oliver Platt had played Oliver Babish in The West Wing and appeared in Frost/Nixon in 2008, and began Chicago Med in 2015. Molly Parker had been in Deadwood from 2004 and House of Cards from 2013. Julian Wadham had played Pitt the Younger in The Madness of King George in 1994 and Madox in The English Patient in 1996, a film directed by Anthony Minghella, who held the rights to the Louis Drax novel from before its publication until his death in 2008.
What the casting changed about the book
The casting changed the characters' nationality, and one job title travelled oddly.
A French family and a French clinician: Pierre and Natalie Drax, and Dr Pascal Dannachet, who narrates half the novel in his own voice.
An American family on the Pacific coast: Peter and Natalie Drax, and Dr Allan Pascal, whose surname is the novel doctor's first name and who narrates nothing.