Beginning with the first film, the creators pulled from their own circle of friends to cast Wick’s. Stahelski met Kelly when both were working on “The Crow,” the 1994 superhero film. “I was a new stunt guy and he was in the cast, and he took time to talk to me,” Stahelski said. “So when I needed a Charlie, he was in my head.” A similar thing happened with Randall Duk Kim, the doctor who patches up Wick’s wounds — Stahelski had worked with him on “The Matrix Reloaded.”
The franchise’s Manhattan setting also played a role in casting. “We were so below the radar, just an independent movie that didn’t even have distribution,” Iwanyk said of the first film. “But we shot in New York City, and there are so many actors there. That’s how we got John Leguizamo, Bridget Moynahan, Lance Reddick,” who died March 17 at age 60 but played Charon, concierge of the New York Continental, owned by Winston (Ian McShane), in all four chapters.
When the characters — and the film — hit, the creators kept many of them on for the sequels. Others soon followed. “When we were talking about ‘2,’ someone said, wouldn’t it be cool if we got Laurence Fishburne, so it would be like Neo and Morpheus?” Lee said of the actor who plays the Bowery King in three of the installments. Berry, who played Sofia Al-Azwar in “3,” asked Stahelski for a part before a script was even written.
In this latest installment, friendship again plays a major role. Old friends return to protect Wick, or hunt him.
But just how, when and why Wick befriended all of these people is still largely a mystery, even to the creators. For the most part, histories for the characters, even for Wick himself, were created on the fly, if at all. “We never wanted to get into John’s back story,” Iwanyk said. “You know these people have a shared experience with John, and you know it was something intense and often violent, but you don’t know what it is specifically.”
