Which big-screen actors deserve a small-screen reinvention?

As Sharon Stone becomes the latest movie star to turn to TV, in Steven Soderbergh mystery thriller Mosaic, who could be next?

If television is where the roles are, which are the actors who should be lured from the film world? Guardian writers name their candidates.

Harrison Ford

Harrison Ford is one of our last true remaining movie stars. His presence is so big that he’s now forced to cannibalise former roles just to find films that can match his charisma. Ford has remained big, but the world of movies has shrunk to a dot around him. Simply put, if Harrison Ford wants to find the work he deserves, he should move to television.

Nothing huge. He doesn’t have to do a Goldblum and lower his sights to the featureless, never-ending goo of Law and Order. Instead, let’s build a limited HBO series around him. Something about a grizzled, complex, reluctant hero who rebuilds himself against all odds as he works towards an impossible goal. It would play to all his strengths and his character would easily be the equal of Solo or Book or Deckard or Jones. Failing that, he could just play my dad in the TV adaptation of that book I wrote last year. That would also work. SH

Sandra Bullock

Oh, how I wanted to be Sandra Bullock: the brunette heroine that we all needed in 1994. After I saw Speed for the first time I wore my watch with the face on the inside of my wrist for years like her character did when concerned that the bus would make her late for work.

Sandra Bullock was beautiful, yes, but she was also just so charismatic. She made The Net watchable despite it’s silly premise. She made While You Were Sleeping seem charming, not stalkerish. She made Miss Congeniality a movie that you can still watch on pretty much any long-haul flight (and I still do).

Bullock won an Oscar for her performance in The Blind Side in 2010, and of course she led Gravity, but these films are just so … earnest. A Bullock-led HBO dramedy would give her the opportunity to bring to the screen the verve and wit of her early career. She speaks fluent German and trained as a singer, so I’m thinking a cold war-era musical set in an East German spa town might be just the ticket. JHE

Cameron Diaz

After Cameron Diaz broke out and somehow became the most memorable thing about a movie where Jim Carrey is possessed by a magical mask, she picked the unlikely route of avoiding the mainstream and dabbling in indies (from The Last Supper to Feeling Minnesota). The results were mixed but highlighted a desire to be known as an actor as well as a movie star and while we saw glimpses after (she was excellent in Being John Malkovich, Vanilla Sky and In Her Shoes), too often she was wasted in thankless comedies.

Diaz has been absent from the big screen since 2014’s Annie and one wonders what she could bring to a darkly comic prestige drama, utilizing both her skills as a comedian but also her frustratingly underused ability to play difficult and unlikable characters. There’s a freak flag that needs to be flown. BL

Leslie Mann

For two decades now, Leslie Mann has been making us cackle as the raunchy mom or foul-mouthed best friend or hip teacher in boilerplate romcoms. A comic bottle rocket, Mann has a gift for physical humour and scathing line deliveries, from the withering way she cocks an eyebrow and cuts people down to size; in This is 40, directed by her husband Judd Apatow, she memorably calls a 13-year-old “miniature Tom Petty” and chafes at his accusation she’s menopausal.

Mann’s always reminded me of Kathryn Hahn, who graduated from comic bridesmaid to leading lady with prestige TV roles on Transparent and I Love Dick. Mann is long overdue for a similar ascent, possessed of the range and raw charisma to anchor a show of her own. Actors like Hahn, Pamela Adlon, and Kristen Bell – all humorists at heart, with the ability to play serious – have scored series of their own in this engorged TV landscape. Mann deserves one too, and her spouse ought to write it for her. JN

Edward Norton

Edward Norton would probably argue he doesn’t need a TV reinvention, thank you very much, given that he regularly gets interesting if mid-ranking roles in the likes of The Grand Budapest Hotel, Sausage Party and, er, Collateral Beauty, and was nominated for an Academy Award as recently as 2014 for his performance in Birdman. Which is fair enough – Edward Norton does not need a TV reinvention in the same way, say, the kid from Gremlins needs a TV reinvention.

But equally Edward Norton is no longer seen by Hollywood as the hyper-combustible leading man that made Fight Club and American History X such engrossing prospects, and, should he ever want to return to those lofty heights, would do well to attach himself to a prestige series exec-produced by your Finchers or your Soderberghs. A leading role in a gruff, gritty mob drama set in his native Boston would do nicely: has Amazon cast that small-screen spin-off of The Departed yet? GM

Juliette Lewis

Aged just 18, Juliette Lewis scored her first and only Oscar nomination – for a precociously nervy, knife-edge performance in Martin Scorsese’s Cape Fear that saw her go toe-to-toe with Robert De Niro. Briefly, the world seemed to be in her palm, yet after an early-90s run of rebel-girl roles that culminated in Natural Born Killers, Hollywood never quite figured out what to do with the spiky outsider: cue substance abuse, a foray into rock music, and a series of lesser character parts, the best of which she made interesting through sheer, weird force of personality.

Lewis has dipped in and out of TV for a while, and recently headlined ABC’s mediocre, short-lived detective show Secrets and Lies (no relation to the Mike Leigh film, alas). But she’s a poor fit for network procedurals: just think how her unpredictable, faintly dangerous screen presence would thrive in a more character-centred environment like Big Little Lies. GL

Thora Birch

Around the dawn of the 21st century, it looked like Thora Birch was destined for great things. A childhood spent around cameras seasoned her as a performer, leading her to a turn as the smart-alecky moppet in Hocus Pocus. By the time she landed her Bafta-nominated role as a sullen, misunderstood high schooler in American Beauty, she could evince vulnerability without the notes of unsureness that typically stick to young actors. She cemented her reputation as the face of the too-cool-for-school alterna-teen as Ghost World’s wisecracking Enid Coleslaw, and in a just world, that would have been the springboard launching her to the uppermost echelon of stardom.

Instead, for reasons that can only be speculated upon, she’s been relegated to a purgatory of Lifetime Original Movies and direct-to-video genre flicks. (Perhaps it has something to do with her father/manager.) She needs a showrunner with fresh memories of her talent, who can bring out the sharp wit that’s laid dormant for too long. CB

Contributors

Stuart Heritage, Jean Hannah Edelstein, Benjamin Lee, Jake Nevins, Charles Bramesco, Gwilym Mumford and Guy Lodge

The GuardianTramp

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