in general, apart from the side he fought on. "I wanted to not absolve him of that, but also not make him pro the side he was on. The best I could do was neutralize him." Taylor Kitsch quickly became his choice for the part, due to a scene in the Friday Night Lights television series where his character, angry, is left behind by the bus that captured Stanton's vision for the character, as Kitsch's pose echoes that of Carter on one cover of the books in Stanton's collection. Lynn Collins, a Juilliard graduate set in her first major movie role as Dejah Thoris early on, tested with many actors, including Josh Duhamel, using a scene (filmed but cut) where she slaps Carter in the face. "Taylor and I have always had incredible chemistry. It was inevitable that we would get a chance to really explore it and work as a team," she said of her co-star in X-Men Origins: Wolverine. She recalls him coming into the dressing room after their test together and, seeing her smoking, told her she would have to quit if she got the part, which she did. At Disney's insistence, she used a British accent. Tom Cruise expressed interest in playing the role once production had begun; Collins did not read with him. "I think him and Andrew had some conversations, but I don't think he was ever actually in the mix so to speak", she recalled in 2022, noting that all the actors she read with were 20 years younger than him. Stanton said that as there was at that time the possibility of making two sequels, he kept that in mind. "[I]t would take a while to make these three movies." he recalled. "I'm like, How do I feel about how these people might age in the next five to seven years?" Willem Dafoe and Samantha Morton played their roles as Tharks wearing motion capture suits while walking on stilts. Cameras attached to their outfits focused on their faces captured their expressions, which were then used to create their characters' faces. "It's a game, it's a new way of performing", he recalled, noting how physically demanding it was. "Always as an actor you're looking for things to jump off from, to find new ways of thinking, new ways of looking, to be turned on in a different way. The stilts were part of