Cast


I gotta say, Ulysses is my 3rd all time favourite novel (after Heart of Darkness and The Hunchback of Notre Dame), and I was trepidatious about this adaptation, but I'm happy to say that I loved it.

What I wanted to ask people about was the three main cast. Did you think they were right for the roles? Personally, I thought Stephen Rae played Bloom far too sullen. In the novel, he's not a sullen character - he's a character who takes great delight in such simple things as reading the paper whilst going to the toilet. I thought the only time Rae actually got it right was in the (excellent) Nightown sequence.

Angeline Ball was beyond perfect as Molly. Absolutely outstanding. She should have gotten an Oscar shout for her performance. The perfect Molly; sexual, wanton, free spirited, but inherently sad. Many critics argue that Molly is really the protagonist of the novel, and I think that was reflected in the film. And her reading of the epic soliloquy at the end of film - oh man, so beautiful. That chapter in the book contains some of the finest prose ever written, and Ball narrated it with such tenderness and feeling.

Hugh O'Connor was fine as Stephen. It's not a huge role after the first 3rd, but I thought he got his melancholy down to a tee.

The rest of the cast was good too; Patrick Bergin as The Citizen, Phelim Drew as Cunningham, and especially Eoin McCarthy as Boylan (he really got Boylan's lecherousness perfect) and the incredibly hot Rachael Pilkington as the seductive Gerty.

So there. What did other people think of the cast, especially people familir with the novel.

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