Nintendo Executive Fellow and Board Member Shigeru Miyamoto has made a huge announcement for the upcoming live action The Legend of Zelda Movie.
Miyamoto personally tweeted on the Japanese Nintendo Co. Ltd. account that Benjamin Evan Ainsworth and Bo Bragason have been cast to play Link and Zelda respectively.
This follows a rumor from last month that they just started casting for these roles, and an earlier rumor that Hunter Schaefer was cast in the movie back in May. This is the first official piece of news from Nintendo about the movie since they announced its rescheduled release date of May 7, 2027.
Benjamin Evan Ainsworth is an English actor born in 2008, and will be filming for the role before he turns 18. He debuted in the entertainment industry at ten in the soap opera Emmerdale, and already starred in The Sandman HBO show as Alex Burgess and voicing Pinocchio in the live-action Disney film directed by Robert Zemeckis.
Bo Bragason is also from England, and being born in 2004, she’s already a young adult when they start filming for this movie at 21. She started in entertainment at an even younger age than Benjamin, with the French movie L’Amour Caché in 2007.
Bragason’s career has mostly in the UK, so you may not recognize her by her face or with her movie and TV roles. But she already has work tangentially related to the video game industry. She voiced Young Luna in the CG animated film Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV.
Sony Pictures under Avi Arad are essentially following the formula to make a film series meant for children and teenagers. Following the same template as Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, and The Chronicles of Narnia, they’ve cast young actors to play the lead roles. In this way, as these young actors grow up onscreen, their fans can grow up alongside them. Some of you may have taken this for granted, or didn’t realize it, but this is the formula to ensure that these movies have lifelong loyal fans, because they would have imprinted these movies, and will associate them with their childhoods.
As you can tell from this news, Arad and his production have worked hard to make these arrangements. For Arad, who got his start in toy company Toy Biz, and would go on to be a pivotal figure in Marvel’s fall and rise from bankruptcy to industry dominance, this could be his next big thing. Arad doesn’t always make successful projects, but the guy who made Morbius and Kraven, and also the Spider-Verse movies, has earned that benefit of the doubt.
We’re sure many of you are already looking forward to seeing these kids play the beloved characters of your childhood in 2027.
