My Fancasting for the Haunting Adeline Movie

Haunting Adeline by H. D. Carlton (2021)

★★★⯪☆

Well, it finally happened. After years of fake Netflix trailers and BookTok rumors, H.D. Carlton has confirmed that Haunting Adeline is officially being adapted into a film. There’s no cast, no director, no release date, and no word on whether it lands in theaters or on streaming. That leaves the casting department wide open, which means I am free to be a menace about it.

My rules are simple. An actor gets in if they meet any of these:

They’ve starred in a similar role
They’re a regular in very dark, niche films
They look the part. This one comes dead last. A wig and contacts can fix a lot, but you can’t fix an actor who’s never touched this kind of material.

I’ve kept the pool to the main players, plus one wildcard I couldn’t resist. Spoilers are kept to a minimum.

Adeline Reilly: Emma Mackey

Hits: similar role, looks the part (close enough, with a little help).

Addie is a snarky, self-deprecating author who moves into a creepy inherited house and handles every bad situation with jokes. Mackey has played almost exactly that. In Emily, she plays Emily Brontë, a writer with a dark imagination living in gothic, windswept isolation. It’s author, brooding manor, and a sharp tongue, basically Addie’s origin story in corsets. She also played Maeve in Sex Education, where she was quick-witted, guarded, and funny, with real feeling underneath.

On looks, she can carry long, wavy auburn hair, which gets us close to Addie’s cinnamon without a heavy wig. The freckles and light brown eyes might need a little help from makeup and contacts.

Runner-up: Ana de Armas, who starred in the fake Haunting Adeline trailers that went around years ago.

Zade Meadows: Alexander Skarsgård

Hits: similar role, dark & niche, looks the part (with VFX help).

Zade is a big, scarred man with one nearly black eye and one ice-pale eye, and the scar cuts straight through the pale one. The makeup and VFX departments will earn their paychecks. But he also has to be charming, controlling, and a little unhinged, sometimes in the same scene.

Skarsgård’s last few years are basically an audition tape. In Infinity Pool, he plays a magnetic predator in one of the weirdest, nastiest movies of the decade. In Pillion, he’s a dominant biker in a controlling relationship with a much more timid partner. And he’s tall enough to loom over anyone, which Zade needs to do constantly.

Runner-up: Penn Badgley. He’s already played a romantic stalker in You, so the mindset is there, but he’s too lean for Zade.

Daya Pierson: Ayo Edebiri

Hits: similar role, dark & niche.

Daya is the best friend who rips the straw out of Addie’s mouth mid-martini and drags her out of her own spiral. She’s sharp, funny, protective, and nobody’s fool. Edebiri’s whole career is deadpan, razor-sharp comic timing, and she’s made a few detours into dark territory that make her a better fit than a typical sitcom friend.

In Opus, a cult-adjacent thriller, she plays a young journalist who gets invited to a reclusive pop star’s isolated compound and slowly realizes something is very wrong. That’s an investigation, a creepy secret society, and a woman too smart to ignore the red flags, which is a pretty good dress rehearsal for Daya. She also starred in Bottoms, the violent teen satire, and The Bear, so she can handle tension and chaos.

Jay: Rami Malek

Hits: similar role, looks the part.

Jay is Zade’s right-hand hacker, the one voice in Zade’s ear he trusts with his life. He’s described with shaggy black hair and a pale face. Malek spent four seasons of Mr. Robot playing Elliot Alderson, a hacker vigilante taking on a corrupt establishment. That’s basically Jay’s job description. I would like to speak to a manager about how little casting this took.

Mark Seinburg: John Lithgow

Hits: similar role.

Mark is a boisterous, glad-handing senator and an older man with bushy white brows and liver spots. He also has a very scary extracurricular schedule. The trick is making him charming enough that you almost forget what he is. Lithgow played the Trinity Killer in Dexter, a respectable suburban family man with a secret ritualistic hobby. That’s the same energy, and nobody does it better.

Daniel “Dan” Boveri: Mads Mikkelsen

Hits: similar role, dark & niche.

Dan is a lawyer for the president: tall, dark, and handsome, with heavy black brows, dark eyes, and a snake-like smile. The danger is that he’s nice. Mikkelsen played Hannibal Lecter on TV, a well-dressed, charming monster who makes menace look like good manners, and he stars in a lot of dark European films besides. The actual eye color is a mismatch, but a smile like that can do what contacts can’t.

Sarina Reilly: Nicole Kidman

Hits: similar role, dark & niche, looks the part.

Sarina is Addie’s mother, and she’s all control: blonde chignon, pink lipstick, icy blue eyes, and perfect posture. Kidman brings that cold elegance to anything she touches. She’s also done The Killing of a Sacred Deer and Babygirl, and she starred in Eyes Wide Shut, which is about a masked secret society and basically the great-uncle of this whole plot. (Hehe.) She’s the easiest call on this list.

Wildcard: Sibby (Sibel): Jenna Ortega

Hits: similar role, dark & niche, looks the part.

I know she’s minor, but I’m not made of stone. Sibby is a girl covered head to toe in blood who looks sweet and innocent until you notice the knife. She also has big brown eyes. Ortega starred in X, played a Final Girl in the Scream movies, and made a career out of playing deadpan weirdos. Hell yeah.

Final Thoughts

That’s my cast, and I’m sure half of you are already typing furious comments about Zade. Tell me who I got wrong and who I got dead right. If the studio is reading this, my email is open and my standards are flexible.

And don’t forget to find your next dark romance read here:

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