Christopher Bollen is the author of The Destroyers, Orient, which was an NPR Best Book of the Year, and the critically acclaimed Lightning People. He is the editor at large of Interview magazine. His work has appeared in GQ, the New York Times, New York magazine, and Artforum, among other publications. He lives in New York City.Bollen applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, A Beautiful Crime, and reported the following:
The difficulty of casting young characters is that often by the time a novel is optioned, a production company hires a screenwriter, the script is shopped around to studios, and the project gets a green light, all of those original actors are too old to play their parts. But since this thought experiment, like Hollywood, is pure fantasy, I would cast Frank Ocean to play Clay Guillory. No, Frank Ocean isn’t an actor, he’s a musician, but this would be his break-through role. Ocean has some of the toughness and warmth that encapsulates Clay, who can be hard to read but is really the heart of the book. I could also see him being played by Lakeith Stanfield, who is such an exquisite performer. He doesn’t immediately remind me of Clay, but Stanfield seems capable of embodying any form he chooses and he’d be able to get the fragility under the cool surface.Visit Christopher Bollen's website.
For Nick, if only Nicholas Hoult were a few years younger. I think Hoult would be able to portray his innocence and charm as well as his greed. Or who is a young, tall Jude Law? The irony is that I’m the Editor at Large of Interview Magazine, which covers do many young actors up to its eyeballs. I should be able to rattle off a number of potential Nicks. The problem is, while I write scenes from a cinematic point of view—I think it’s encoded in my generation, babysat as we were by television sets—I never think of characters that way. Okay, okay, I’ll say Logan Lerman would do an excellent job. Or George MacKay. Or a very young Montgomery Clift.
The Page 69 Test: A Beautiful Crime.
--Marshal Zeringue
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