What a difference a day can make. Just yesterday, August 6th, we reported that Uli Latukefu would be taking on the role of Ganondorf in the upcoming Legend of Zelda film. The villainous character is one of the more imposing figures in video game history. That news also came a year after the news about Bo Bragason and Benjamin Evan Ainsworth playing Zelda and Link respectively. Well, we didn’t have to wait a year to find out even more casting news. It actually took less than a day.
In some news that’s extremely bittersweet, it’s being reported that the late, great, Sam Neill will be in the upcoming game adaptation. There’s no word yet on who he’ll be playing. Our guess, possibly the King of Hyrule. He seems like a good fit for it but that’s purely just guessing. This is of course, coming not even a month after the announcement that he passed away. We’re still reeling from the heartbreak of that. Will it be nice to see him in a high-profile picture? Undoubtedly. Will it make us miss him all over again? Absolutely.
Other casting news includes Lydia Peckham. The New Zealand actress has recently appeared in MGM+ series of Robin Hood as well as the movies The Wrecking Crew and Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. Also being reported to star is Australian actress, Yvonne Strahovski. Her body of work is far more numerous and even includes voicing the character of Miranda Lawson in the Mass Effect series. More recently she kept herself busy in The Handmaid’s Tale. There’s a running theme here, Strahovski and Latukefu are Australian. Peckham and Sam Neill are from New Zealand. Oh, and Dichen Lachman, who you might remember from Succession is coming onto the project. She’s reportedly playing Impa, Zelda’s guard of sorts. Lachman also is based out of Australia.
That’s a lot of casting news all at once with a lot of questions still up in the air. Who’s Strahovski playing? Is our guess about Sam Neill as the King of Hyrule correct? What backstory are they giving Ganondorf? It might be easier to figure out if we knew what branch of the Zelda storyline we’re going with here. Given that The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was a huge deal for the franchise, maybe that’s the one? It did bring us full on voice-acting and such. It seems like a good place to start a film franchise with. But for all we know, the story could be an amalgamation of different games.
This is a big difference from what happened with Nintendo and their reveal of The Super Mario Bros. Movie cast. They did that all in a Nintendo Direct presentation. But for The Legend of Zelda, we’re finding out about it all through industry reports lately. And the Link and Zelda casting news was done by Shigeru Miyamoto himself online. It’s a vastly different approach that’s keeping us on our toes. We’ll continue to let you know when we hear more about how Hyrule is shaping up.
