Casting revealed: Shadows of the Apt - the movie : Shadows of the Apt

Casting revealed: Shadows of the Apt — the movie

There is no movie. Just keeping that out there. But I have had an enormous number of suggestions from here, FB, Twitter and just basically people in the street, so we now have a cast! Thank you to everyone who chipped in (list at the end, but let me know if somehow I've missed you off).

I'm doing this in more than one part, but here are the major players for Empire in Black and Gold, in rough order of appearance :

Empire in Black and Gold

Stenwold Maker — Lawrence Fishburn, Tisamon — Mads Mikkelsen, Cheerwell Maker — Lenora Crichlow

Totho — Chiwetel Ejiofor, Tynisa — Georgina Haig, Salma — Rain (Jung Ji-Hoon)

Thalric — Michael Fassbender, Scyla — Tilsa Swinton, Scuto — Sean Pertwee

Achaeos — Alex Barclay, Hokiak — Ron Perlman, te Berro — Tim Hewitt

Ulther — Sean Bean, Kymene — Gina Torres, Grief in Chains — Rachel Hurd-Wood

Balkus — Dwayne Johnson

With thanks to (in no order at all): Rad Kerrigan, Sesqui Pedality, Tom Jewell, Andrew Clark, Nicole Jillian S, Stuart Clark, David Young, Alex Hormann, Vesy Vesy, Kailander, Communi-kate, Mark Waz Bretherick, Matthew Brown, Andrea Rivers, Kathryn, Esther Reeves, Sandor, Ross Anderson, Alex Savell, Bru Newhall, Kostas Mavraganis, Cameron Young, Helen Ann, Martin Findell, David Lascelles, James Long, Ciaran, John Frost, Zoe Farr, Roderick, Leguim Mai, Rebecca Spencer, Joff Leader, Sparrow, Adam Richard Christopher Crewe, Occasional Visitor

All photos are from IMDB, which I hope is OK with all concerned as they're intended as publicity shots.

Casting for the next set of books is up here.

Posted by Adrian Tchaikovsky on May 25th, 2014

Posted in Blog, Home

Tags: casting, Rants

14 Comments

14 comments to “Casting revealed: Shadows of the Apt — the movie”

Anska, May 25th, 2014 at 10:58 am:

Agree with all the above except I want Paul Bettany as Tisamon and Christopher Walken as Thalric. Great fun doing this 🙂
Casting Revealed — Shadows of the Apt II: the Kinden Strike Back : Shadows of the Apt, May 26th, 2014 at 10:32 am:

[…] The casting for Empire in Black and Gold can be found here. […]
Esther, June 2nd, 2014 at 3:38 pm:

Prefer Daniel Craig as Thalric..
Really hope they'll make a movie out of this, with lots of cool visual effect.. It'll be great!
Casting Revealed: Shadows of the Apt III — Revenge of the Insects : Shadows of the Apt, June 3rd, 2014 at 10:55 pm:

[…] here we go again, following on from Empire in Black and Gold and the rest of the first plot arc, and finishing with a special sneak […]
Smithy, June 4th, 2014 at 6:00 pm:

I feel sorry for Sean Pertwee, getting cast as the ugliest guy in Aptland.

Michael Fassbender — it's so obvious in hindsight
CommissarFeesh, June 7th, 2014 at 12:58 pm:

I love how Sean Bean gets to die again XD
Casting Call: Guns of the Dawn : Shadows of the Apt, November 18th, 2015 at 10:11 pm:

[…] epic of Shadows of the Apt (2). For the sake of because I like it, the SOTA casting calls are here, here and […]
Andy Angel, November 19th, 2015 at 10:42 pm:

If I had to make one change it'd be to give the role of Grief in Chains to Anna Kendrick
Casting Call : The Tiger and the Wolf : Shadows of the Apt, August 18th, 2016 at 11:52 pm:

[…] Empire in Black and Gold […]
EBG, Chapter One – Political Aptitude, July 26th, 2017 at 3:49 pm:

[…] fantasy casting of Stenwold is apparently Lawrence Fishburn, which seems pretty spot […]
lox, September 16th, 2018 at 12:42 am:

please please make a film series
Adrian Tchaikovsky, September 18th, 2018 at 9:48 pm:

not something I have any say over but it would be grand.
Stephen Flaherty, March 10th, 2021 at 2:21 pm:

Kind of a related thing to casting is how the various different kindred would sound. I mean, it's been established that there's all one language, but you figure there'd be dialects or, at the very least, accents. So, having a stab at it:

Beetles: Maybe it's because both I and the author are English, but I've always imagined the Beetles having English accents. Also, Collegium seems very much like a Victorian London. So English accents, but not identical ones. The masters of Collegium would have a very upper-class, Received Pronunciation accent, Oxbridge like, the accent of Victorian explorers and the Royal Society, with its faint condescending and patronising traces to all those who don't share it. Other Collegians, the artificers and workers, would have a Cockney accent, Collegium being London. Helleron seems more Northern, both geographically and culturally (with its dark, Satanic Mills) so Yorkshire and Lancaster, perhaps Mancunian. And this would apply to the magnates too — think of Bradley Hardacre or the four Yorkshiremen of the Monty Python sketch

Moths: A race of people driven from their lands by the (English) beetles, yet still keeping their ancient wisdom — has to be Welsh.

Spiders: Cultured, refined, artistic and able to give the Beetles a sense of cultural inferiority — French, of course. What else?

Dradonflies: The Commonweal seems to resemble mediaeval Japanese society more than anything else, so Japanese accents would seem to fit here. Likewise for the Grasshoppers.

Scorpions: A Slavic Cossack or Russian mafia style accent.

Mantids: A difficult one, but again the culture seems to be Japanese Samurai more than anything else, so perhaps Japanese again. Don't like reusing them, though.

Mosquito: Given their vampiric nature then a Transylvanian accent seems unavoidable.

Wasps: This will probably be controversial, but American (USA) accents seem called for here. The Yankee ingenuity merged with the drive for conquest. Americans might not like the analogy, but I'm sure everyone else will see it. The Bees could be Canadian, as they're neighbours.

And try as I might, I couldn't think of an appropriate accent for the Ants. Anyone else want to try?
Stephen Flaherty, March 10th, 2021 at 2:38 pm:

Incidentally, I know you say the movie is unlikely, but this was written in 2014, around season 4 of Game of Thrones, and the success of that series (even with the disappointing end) has left people wondering where the next Game of Thrones could come from. And Shadows of the Apt would seems to be perfect for a GoT style miniseries, 10 episodes per book, more or less. The first four books tell a more-or-less complete story and it could maybe be pitched like that. Has there been any interest? HBO and Netflix don't know what they're missing.

Shadows of the Apt