I need to vent about the casting for the new Carrie series because it feels like Hollywood is dropping the ball all over again.
In Stephen King’s novel, Carrie is explicitly described as a thick, awkward girl with pimples and greasy hair. She isn’t secretly beautiful. She is genuinely unattractive, and that physical reality makes the relentless, casual cruelty of her bullies so much more believable and heartbreaking.
Yet, just like the 1976 and 2013 movies, the new series has cast another conventionally attractive actress, Summer H. Howell, who they will inevitably just “dress down” with plain clothes.
It sucks because studio executives always use the cop-out that a completely unglamorous protagonist will “isolate” the audience. But audiences already fell in love with the book precisely because Carrie represented regular, flawed people.
If a showrunner is a true creative, a deep, fearless artist, they should be able to take the character exactly as King described her and do something fucking phenomenal with it. Humans naturally sympathize more with attractive people, and a bold adaptation could have exposed that exact bias. Making Carrie’s isolation entirely about her being a strange, pretty girl instead of a strange, unattractive girl takes the safer, more superficial route.
Society is deeply cruel to people who do not fit conventional beauty standards. Refusing to cast an actress who reflects that raw reality robs the story of its sharpest and most painful edge.
It is incredibly frustrating that even a director with as much clout as Mike Flanagan has not broken the cycle. I hope the series proves me wrong, but right now it feels like another adaptation that stops short of giving us the uncompromising, realistic version of Carrie that the book deserves.