I don't have anything against ...

• Nov 17, 2005 03:00 AM ET
• by Maitland McDonagh

Darling Mimis: Rosario Dawson (top) and Daphne Rubin-Vega

Question: I don't have anything against Rosario Dawson, but I wonder why Daphne Rubin-Vega wasn't offered or didn't take the part of Mimi in the movie version of Rent, especially when so many of the other original Broadway cast members are reprising their roles.

Answer: In fact, all but two of Rent's original cast members are reprising their roles in the movie, which you can spin for good or for bad. On the one hand, their performances are the defining interpretations of those roles, and given that Rent is such a recent work, every subsequent performer must make a conscious choice to either work within or actively go against the interpretations those original actors established. (By contrast, no one today is oppressed by the way Hamlet was originally played.) Drawing on the original cast ensures that the essence of the show's appeal will get carried over to the film. On the other hand, the characters are all young — teenagers and kids in their early 20s — and the original cast members are all now much older than that, something that's much more easily masked onstage than on film. Taye Diggs, Anthony Rapp and Wilson Jermaine Heredia are 33, Idina Menzel and Adam Pascal are 34, and Jesse L. Martin is 36.

Director Chris Columbus told Playbill.com that when he signed on to the project, he got a lot of pressure to cast young pop stars like Justin Timberlake, Christina Aguilera and Usher. He decided to go with most of the original cast members because he felt they had a collective chemistry that he'd never be able to get with a group of actors brought together expressly for the film. He went on to say that Daphne Rubin-Vega, now 36, was pregnant at the time the project was coming together, which made using her "difficult." In a New York Times interview, Fredi Walker, who was 33 when she originated the role of Joanne and was the only other cast member replaced for the movie, said flat out that she wasn't offered the role because she was "too old." Walker was replaced by Tracie Thoms, who's 30; Rosario Dawson is 26. I'm sure there's more to the story, and find it suggestive that there are only three principal women's roles and two of them have been recast; age is a much bigger issue for actresses than it is for actors. But I don't know anything more than what I've just said and I'm going to refrain from speculating further. Everything comes out in the end.