Originally Posted by
Revolutionary_Jack
If you mean Kirsten Dunst, she's long been a respected actress. Appearing in a number of cool and interesting films as a child star (like Small Soldiers by Joe Dante), before breaking out with The Virgin Suicides by Sofia Coppola, a movie that put both of them on the map. After breaking it big as Spider-Man, she appeared in a number of films (working with Sofia Coppola a few times) and won a prize at Cannes for Melancholia.
So it's ridiculous to claim Ann Margret has won more accolades than Kirsten Dunst. Sure she appeared in Carnal Knowledge, which is a fairly minor film of '70s American cinema (granted, even minor '70s films are probably more interesting than major films made today) but it's certainly not a great film, or among Jack Nicholson's best, nor was she ranked among the defining actresses of '70s Hollywood (Faye Dunaway, Julie Christie, Jane Fonda, Diane Keaton to name a few). As for Tommy, it's a cult movie at best, and not among Russell's best (THE DEVILS).
The Misfits? River of No Return? Bus Stop? Or what about her supporting turns in The Asphalt Jungle and All About Eve? The real problem with Monroe was actually her desire to be "taken seriously", she fell under the spell of Strasberg (who completely misinterpreted the Method and made things worse) and second guessed her performances and that led to overwork and reliance on sleeping pills, and well y'know. She'd have been better off, and lived longer had she done the comedies and it's a pity nobody valued that. But in either case she certainly proved her talent several times over.
I
A bit of both. It's not the worst idea in the world to cast an actor with life experiences similar to the character. That's why Robert Downey Jr. was cast as Iron Man after all. A story about a 40 year old dude in a mid-life crisis who had a notorious media reputation...cast a 40-year old actor in a mid-life crisis who had a notorious media reputation. I am speaking of course platonically, not literally. The fact is that it's extremely difficult to cast a comics character in live-action. In the case of Iron Man, by casting Downey Jr he totally changed the character and updated someone who was originally a Howard Hughes/Errol Flynn mashup. The original choices for Iron Man - Tom Cruise, Jude Law - reflect the Hughes/Flynn lineage better. It's still good casting but it's not the character in the comics.
Casting any part is hard but for a comics character you have to cast a character who's essentially visualized and realized and dramatized fully in art. If you do the "jackpot" moment in movies to do it right, you need to do a character entrance as immediately iconic and transcendent as say, Han Solo in A NEW HOPE in the Mos Eisley Cantina, or Darth Vader at the start of ANH or Harry Lime in "The Third Man". And you can't recreate the comics in movies and expect that to have the same effect.
There's basically two perfect castings in the entire history of comic book movies:
-- Shelley Duvall as Olive Oyl in Robert Altman's POPEYE. Altman struck gold when he cast an actress who looked like Olive Oyl (both comics and cartoons), moved like Olive Oyl and who could imitate the voice. It's almost criminally accurate in terms of casting. You literally can't do it better.
-- J. K. Simmons as J. Jonah Jameson. The opening scene in the mid-point of Spider-Man 1 where you saw Jameson hold court in the Bugle Editorial was electric because vocally, visually, and performatively, you went "That's the guy". It's uncanny.**
And it's extremely hard to get that kind of casting for Peter Parker or Mary Jane Watson because those characters evolved over the long run.
-- In the case of Peter Parker, you would ideally need to cast someone who looks like Ditko Peter but who midway becomes Romita Peter, a bit like how the actor who played Neville Longbottom in the HP movies looked scrawny and scared in the first movie appropriate to how he was introduced but the child actor had a growth spurt and became more charismatic and handsome. The Spider-Movies we have essentially make one or two choices rather than cast with an eye to evolve. So Tobey Maguire is visually Ditko Peter (boxy-headed) but he's cast in a character who's supposed to grow and evolve across the first film (midway he graduates high school). Garfield was cast as Romita!Peter and that makes sense, his face has the angular lines and the longer hair of the college-era except they cast him in high school and situate it there and not pick it up when he's older. So they make the backwards-ass decision. Tom Holland is again Ditko!Peter and this time he's the youngest actor but then you run into the Daniel Radcliffe problem where basically the young kid actor you cast as franchise lead doesn't actually have the charisma and presence to be a real leading man (something that Radcliffe is aware of and has such used his considerable wealth to basically be a character actor as a form of amusing hobby) and Tom Holland's Peter simply can't carry a film the way that both Tobey and Andrew could. You have many scenes in the Raimi and Webb movies where you have Peter by himself and the drama is interesting because the actors are able to engage the audience, but Holland is a chattering box all the time and always in two-handers with someone or some-voice because he's better as a character actor.
-- In the case of Mary Jane, you need to cast a young actress who is essentially making her film debut (i.e. someone without previous movie or media experience to build associations) and then when you see her, she's suddenly the biggest thing ever. You need to discover the next Marilyn Monroe to get that effect. The closest in recent cinema was Margot Robbie in The Wolf of Wall Street, where overnight you had a brand new star. Robbie had appeared in some Australian TV shows but was a total unknown. Then she worked in a major movie with the greatest living American director and the biggest male star and more than held her own. And again that's a very tall ask for basically a single panel-effect. Ultimately if you focus on the character that ultimately developed in the comics -- a girl from a broken home struggling to find her place, you can work with that, and that's how they portrayed Kirsten Dunst's Mary Jane. In the case of Zendaya's MJ, you have someone with a more contemporary affect for the weird energy that MJ had in the early comics (where she was Stan Lee's attempt at writing a hippie...i.e badly) into someone interested in activism and trolling people for amusement. Zendaya's MJ gets that the character is supposed to be funny and light-spirited (albeit with dramatic moments as well).
Generally, I find Zendaya's MJ better casting than Tom Holland as Peter, but on the whole the entire conception of the film just doesn't serve the characters. The MCU Spider-Man is essentially sexless and fixated on male daddy figures. That's a total disservice to Peter aka the most heterosexual man in comics. It doesn't foreground the love story and romance. At heart the story of Spider-Man is the love story of Peter and Mary Jane, that's the throughline that connects the entire continuity and the Raimi films got that. I get that the story being about teenagers in high school might make Disney weird about tackling that but the solution is age up the characters, after all Peter met MJ when they were in college and not high school.
** To elaborate on JK Simmons and Jameson. Perfect casting doesn't always lead to a fully rounded and accurate portrayal of the character. As great as Simmons is as Jameson, the Raimi movies generally don't give him much to do after the first film and he's basically there as comic relief after that. Great scenes but the Jameson of the comics is a complex, gray, and deeply fascinating character with a lot of nuance, and ultimately it's a pity that Raimi and the writers didn't allow Simmons' Jameson any avenue to grow. So sometimes perfect casting doesn't lead to perfect characterization.