I personally think it would improve the chances of Depp Shadows being a decent movie in its own right if both the conceptualization of the characters and the casting of the actors to play them goes "outside the box" of trying to find types to match up with who we originally saw onscreen in the 1960s series.
Let's face it--they broke the mold when Grayson Hall took birth. Trying to find someone somehow "like" her for Julia is a waste of time. The Kelly Hu casting *could* have given an interesting slant to the character because thinking of her as an Asian American female professional immediately gives a very different context to the character's action in the Barnabas-out-of-his-coffin phase of the story.
Similarly, I would love to see a black, or mixed-race, actress in the role of Angelique. In fact, I was thinking about it this morning and thinking how interesting it would be if the story was told so that more audience sympathy was on the side of Angelique because she was not white and doomed to perpetual servitude and therefore had more of an axe to grind beyond Barn not wanting to marry her. In the original portrayal of the character in 1795, they gave her LOTS of dialogue about her own perception of her lot and how she was going to "show them all." I thought that made her much more interesting than the 1991 version where she's some kind of bat out of hell who is completely psychotic from the get-go. It wasn't at all nuanced or layered and frankly, I found her ridiculous rather than terrifying.
Unfortunately, American pop culture is now obsessed with narratives of apocalypse and ultimate evil (for obvious reasons), so I'm not sure that a three dimensional Angelique is on the cards. But I amused myself this morning imagining Angelique as the anti-heroine and Josette as a haughty, frigid bitch loved by Barnabas and cosseted by her family but not terribly attractive to the 21st century viewer.
I could write more but I'll stop. I could see Philip Seymour Hoffman having a great presence as Stokes, if that character is on board (seems unlikely).
G.