I tend to like to just go with the script if it's a good script." John Malkovich as Unferth. Malkovich became involved in the project because one of his friends, who had worked with Zemeckis, "spoke very highly of him. I had always found him a very interesting and innovative filmmaker. I liked the script very much and I liked the group involved and the process interested me a great deal also." He found the experience of working with motion capture to be similar to his experiences working in the theater. He also found the process intriguing: "Say you do a normal day of filmmaking. Sometimes that's 1/8 of a page, sometimes it's 3/8th of a page, normally let's say it's 2½ pages, maybe 3. Now it's probably a little more than it used to be but not always. So you may be acting for a total of 20 minutes a day. In this, you act the entire day all the time except for the tiny amount of time it takes them to sort of coordinate the computer information, let's say, and make sure that the computers are reading the data and that you're transmitting the data. It interests me on that level because I'm a professional actor so I'd just as soon act as sit around." Malkovich also recalled that he studied the original poem in high school, and that "I think we got smacked if we couldn't recite a certain number of stanzas. It was in the Old English class and I think my rendition was exemplary." Brendan Gleeson as Wiglaf, Beowulf's lieutenant Robin Wright Penn as Queen Wealtheow Alison Lohman as Ursula, Beowulf's concubine when he is an old king Costas Mandylor as Hondshew Sebastian Roche as Wulfgar Greg Ellis as Garmund Tyler Steelman as Young Cain, Unferth's disabled slave Dominic Keating as Adult Cain Rik Young as Eofor Charlotte Salt as Estrith Leslie Harter Zemeckis as Yrsa Fredrik Hiller as Finn of Frisia Production Development Author Neil Gaiman and screenwriter Roger Avary wrote a screen adaptation of Beowulf in May 1997 (they had met while working on a film adaptation of Gaiman's The Sandman in 1996 before Warner Bros. canceled it). The script had been optioned by ImageMovers in the same year and set up at DreamWorks with Avary slated to direct and Robert Zemeckis producing. Avary stated he wanted to make a small-scale, gritty film