"Damian Lewis, whom I first saw in Band of Brothers, is an extraordinary young British actor," says Kasdan. "He’s very magnetic, charismatic and soulful. I was just wildly taken with him, and could see that he played an American very easily; I was just knocked out by his abilities."
A unique facet of Jonesy provided Kasdan and company with both a design challenge and an incredible creative opportunity: his "memory warehouse." "The idea behind the memory warehouse is that all of Jonesy’s memories and experiences are stored in what is essentially a big library," explains Kasdan. "In it are all of his memories; sports humiliations, old report cards, the lyrics to every song on every record that he’s ever owned. It’s not the easiest concept to convey in a movie, but Jon Hutman, the production designer, achieved it brilliantly by coming up with a graceful spiral design, and our set designer Rose Marie McSherry filled every single shelf of this multi-storied warehouse. Eventually, it winds up being the scene of a chase in which Jonesy is trying to hide some of the warehoused information from the menacing intruder who has broken into his mind; your mind is not a place you would want anyone rummaging around and seeing what you’ve got in there."
Timothy Olyphant plays Pete, whose unique talent for finding what is lost once saved a little girl and made him a hero; these days he uses it to locate misplaced car keys and try to pick up on women.
"I’d seen Tim Olyphant in Go," says Kasdan. "Tim is a very typically American actor – he’s very instinctive and very much in the vernacular. I wanted him to play Pete, who in some ways is the saddest of the friends."
"Pete wanted to be an astronaut," says Olyphant, "and now he is selling cars at a used car dealership, so there’s a certain amount of disappointment that he’s living with, or denying; he’s turned to drinking all the time. I think that behind all of Pete’s charm and humor there’s a certain kind of sadness; he’s definitely confused about how he’s got to where he is, and why he isn’t where he thought he’d be."
Donnie Wahlberg was cast in the pivotal role of Duddits, the mysterious figure at the center of the friends’ circle. Kasdan knew that it was imperative that the actor playing Duddits be able to come in late in the movie and make the audience care deeply about the character in a very short amount of time. "He’s central to the story, so that in a very short amount of screen time he has to have enormous impact. And Donnie totally embraced that challenge, he went out of his way to look sickly, to lose the weight and shave his head and take extreme measures with his make-up."
"In a sense, Duddits is the fifth friend," says Wahlberg. "When they stumble across him in their childhood, they save him from a bully and he rewards them by giving them a gift. That gift forces them to bond together, and that’s the real power that he gave them, this bond that they share for the rest of their lives.
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