L and Light (Yagami, not Turner) in the “Death Note” anime series.
It’s no secret that Hollywood is all out of original ideas and resorting to adaptations to make the big bucks. Enter Netflix’s live-action adaptation of “Death Note” set to release in 2017. In this case, I’m glad a group of producers presumably got lazy, threw up their hands and were like “Welp! Who’s tired of paying writers overtime? How about that cartoon where that Asian boy kills people off by writing in the journal that belongs to the monster thing who loves apples?” Everyone’s pupils subsequently turn into dollar signs and high fives are issued all around.
The cast of the movie has been revealed and include the following actors:
Nat Wolff as Light Turner
Keith Stanfield as L
Margaret Qualley as Mia Sutton
Willem Dafoe (voice) as Ryuk
Shjea Whigham as James Turner
Paul Nakauchi as Watari
At a glance, my initial reaction was: “Woah, L is black. That’s pretty cool. Gahhhh my man Dafoe, the Green Goblin, is Ryuk- I can’t wait to watch him do backflips over apples! Boo, why is there only one Asian person in the cast- and in a relatively small role at that.”
I’m only a little disappointed in the lack of Asians in the cast and I’m interested to see how Netflix plans on executing its own adaptation. This won’t be the first live-action adaptation of the original suspense manga written by Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata, as there has already been a string of films and even a tv series released in Japan under the Death Note franchise: Death Note, Death Note: The Last Name, Death Note (Japanese television series adaptation), Death Note: Light Up the New World.
