Patty Jenkins Helped Covertly Cast Christopher Plummer in ‘All the Money in the World’

When Christopher Plummer was cast in All the Money in the World as a replacement for Kevin Spacey, everyone was impressed at that quick turnaround. How did Ridley Scott pull it off? And how did he do it without the press getting wind of it until the decision was made?

Plummer had been on Scott’s shortlist to play penny-pinching patriarch J. Paul Getty before he had started filming the movie, but apparently Scott needed to do a little finagling to covertly talk to Plummer again about appearing in the movie. Writer David Scarpa revealed to The Hollywood Reporter that Wonder Woman director Patty Jenkins had actually helped out with casting Plummer, acting as a red herring for the press so that Scott could talk to Plummer in private.

“If it gets out, and we don’t cast this and we can’t make it happen, the movie is dead,” Scarpa said. But recasting a role is complicated, especially this late in the game and especially under this kind of outside scrutiny. “When a call goes out to the casting agencies, ‘Ridley Scott is looking for an actor to play a 90-year-old guy,’ pretty much everybody knows what movie that is.”

So, they asked Jenkins, who had been working with her husband on the TNT series One Day She’ll Darken. “Ridley’s casting agents basically asked if they could send the call out for the part under their production’s name,” Scarpa said. “So basically it was, ‘Patty Jenkins is looking for a 90-year-old guy.’ That was basically how they were able to do it. There was a lot of this sort of… crafty maneuvers in order to make this thing come off.”

All the Money in the World is now playing.