
Here Squires dreamcasts an adaptation of Low April Sun:
It's fun to think about casting Low April Sun, and harder than I'd have imagined. I've got three main characters who turn up in two timelines, twenty years apart, so it's them I thought of casting. Edie Ash is a waitress applying for graduate schools and battling a drinking problem in the 1995 timeline of the story, when her half-sister disappears on the day of the Oklahoma City bombing, and she's a sober oil executive with a guilty conscience about fracking, a little boy she loves, and a gambling-addict husband in the 2015 part of the book--which is the present of the story. Given the time jump, I could either cast young actors and age them up a little for the twenty-year jump or cast older actors for the 2015 timeline. Since money's no object here, I'll do the latter. So, for 1995 Edie, I think her young self could be played by Margaret Qualley, who was the best thing about the Coen Brothers' Drive-Away Dolls, and Rebecca Ferguson would be perfect for Edie in her 40s. Both actors convey smarts and vulnerability and energy. The question is: can they do Okie accents? One imagines that a Bene Gesserit witch like the one Ferguson plays in Dune could do anything she wanted, even making two syllables out of three-letter words (Dad=Dayed).Visit Constance E. Squires's website.
Keith Frayne, who is Edie's sister's boyfriend in 1995 and Edie's husband in 2015, is described as looking like someone Finn Wolfhard could play. Vaguely eastern-European features, pale skin, dark hair, tall and thin. My daughter has been watching Stranger Things on heavy rotation for the last five years, so I may even have had Finn Wolfhard in mind as I wrote. I could see an older Keith being played by Timothy Olyphant or Adam Driver. All three actors can do feckless and screwed up and gobsmacked yet can also bring leading man energy into a scene. They'd need all of that with Keith, who is good guy with some bad traits. In 1995 he's a graduate student in history focusing on manifest destiny in the American West, and in 2015 he's an adjunct professor with no tenure and a bad gambling addiction. The third character to cast for both timelines is August P. He's a 16-year-old boy being forced because of his parents to live at Elohim City, the white separatist compound in Northeast Oklahoma that Timothy McVeigh may have frequented. He's a little odd in an undefined way, and a good person, kind of the moral center of the book. He's 36 in 2015 and has spent the ensuing years eaten up with guilt about his brief association with Timothy McVeigh, the bomber of the Oklahoma City Murrah building. He's blond and blue-eyed and strange. I see Ben Foster for him in the later timeline. Garrett Hedlund could work, too. For August as a sixteen-year-old, Asa Butterfield could do it, though he's mid-twenties now, and with the same caveat about the accent. He was so good in Sex Education I think he can probably do anything.
There are several other important characters, but I'll just mention one--Timothy McVeigh, the only real person, the domestic terrorist who planned and executed the bombing in Oklahoma City. The lead singer of Movements, Patrick Miranda, looks uncannily like McVeigh in the band's earlier videos, so maybe he's always wanted to be an actor. Also, Jacob Lofland, currently in Landman, could work.
Sterlin Harjo or Taylor Sheridan are the directors/screenwriters whose interest in my book would make me happiest. They both know the contemporary southern plains culture in the book and are both good at dramatizing character flaws.
--Marshal Zeringue