Let's be real for a second. When you look at the cast of Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, you aren't looking at a group of B-movie nobodies. On paper, this was actually a pretty stacked lineup. You had rising stars from massive franchises like Maze Runner and Marvel, plus character actors who usually crush every scene they’re in. Yet, when the movie hit theaters in 2021, the internet basically went into a meltdown. Fans were torn between "Finally, they look like the game characters!" and "Wait, why does Leon S. Kennedy act like he’s never held a gun before?"
It’s a weird situation. Director Johannes Roberts clearly wanted to pivot away from the Milla Jovovich "superhero" era. He wanted survival horror. He wanted the 1998 vibes. But casting a movie based on a legendary video game is a tightrope walk. You have to satisfy people who have spent 25 years looking at 32-bit polygons while also making a movie that actually works for a general audience.
Honestly? The actors weren't the problem.
Kaya Scodelario as Claire Redfield: The Reluctant Hero
Kaya Scodelario was the anchor. If you’ve seen her in Skins or Crawl, you know she does "traumatized but resourceful" better than almost anyone in her age bracket. In this version of Raccoon City, Claire isn’t just looking for her brother; she’s a conspiracy theorist. She’s the one who smells the rot at Umbrella Corp before the first zombie even bites.
Scodelario brings a certain grit to the role that feels grounded. She doesn't have the "super-soldier" aura that the later games gave Claire. Instead, she feels like a person who grew up in a messed-up orphanage and learned to fight because she had to. It’s a departure from the Resident Evil 2 remake version of the character, but it stays true to the spirit of a survivor.
The chemistry—or lack thereof—with her on-screen brother Chris (played by Robbie Amell) is intentional. They are estranged. It’s awkward. Amell plays Chris Redfield as a guy who drank the corporate Kool-Aid. He’s the hometown hero who stayed behind to work for the town's biggest employer, oblivious to the fact that his bosses are literally turning people into monsters. Amell has the physique for Chris, but the script keeps him boxed in as the "skeptical jock" for way too long.
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The Leon Kennedy Controversy
We have to talk about Avan Jogia. This was arguably the most debated casting choice in the entire cast of Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City.
In the games, Leon is a "golden boy." Even on his first day as a cop, he’s tactical, capable, and has that iconic, slightly feathered hair. Jogia’s Leon is... different. He’s portrayed as a bit of a screw-up whose dad pulled strings to get him a job in a dying town. He’s hungover. He’s clumsy.
Fans hated it.
But if you look at it from a narrative perspective, it’s a bold choice. Jogia plays the "rookie" aspect literally. He’s the audience surrogate who is completely overwhelmed by the nightmare unfolding around him. By the time he picks up the rocket launcher at the end, the transformation is supposed to feel earned. Whether it worked is up for debate, but Jogia’s performance is actually quite charismatic if you can separate it from the pixel-perfect image in your head.
Turning Villains Into Humans: Tom Hopper and Hannah John-Kamen
Albert Wesker is usually a cartoon villain. He wears sunglasses indoors and talks about global saturation. Tom Hopper (who most people know as Luther from The Umbrella Academy) takes a very different path here.
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Hopper’s Wesker is actually... kind of a nice guy? At first. He’s a buddy to the STARS members. He jokes around. This makes his inevitable betrayal feel more like a desperate career move than a grand scheme for world domination. It makes him human. It also makes him more dangerous because you don't see it coming until the pagers start buzzing.
Then you have Hannah John-Kamen as Jill Valentine.
John-Kamen is a powerhouse. She was great in Ant-Man and the Wasp and Killjoys. Her Jill is a "chaos agent." She’s a crack shot, she’s aggressive, and she has more personality in her pinky finger than most action leads. The movie doesn't give her enough to do, frankly. Putting her in the Spencer Mansion sequence was a nice nod to the 1996 game, but she often felt like a secondary character in a story that should have highlighted her more.
The Supporting Players Who Stole the Show
Sometimes the best parts of the cast of Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City were the people in the periphery.
- Donal Logue as Chief Brian Irons: This was casting perfection. Logue plays Irons as a sweaty, panicked, foul-mouthed coward. He perfectly captures the energy of a man who knows the ship is sinking and is willing to trample anyone to get to the lifeboat.
- Neal McDonough as William Birkin: You need a guy who can look intensely creepy while also appearing like a devoted family man. McDonough is the king of this. His descent from a cold scientist to a mutated G-Virus monster is one of the film’s highlights.
- Marina Mazepa as Lisa Trevor: Though she’s under a mountain of prosthetics, Mazepa’s physical performance is haunting. She brings a tragic quality to Lisa Trevor that actually improves on some aspects of the game’s lore.
Why the Ensemble Faced an Uphill Battle
The biggest hurdle for this cast wasn't their acting ability. It was the fact that the movie tried to mash two massive games into one 100-minute runtime.
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Think about that.
Resident Evil 1 is a claustrophobic haunted house story in a mansion. Resident Evil 2 is a sprawling city-wide riot and police station siege. By trying to do both at once, the characters often felt rushed. We didn't get enough time to see the STARS team bond before the horror started. We didn't get to see Leon and Claire’s relationship develop beyond a few brief interactions.
The actors were forced to do a lot of heavy lifting with very little dialogue. Scodelario and Amell had to sell a decade of sibling trauma in about three minutes of screen time. Hopper had to turn Wesker from a friend to a foe in the span of a single helicopter ride. It's a lot to ask of any ensemble.
The Legacy of This Raccoon City
Looking back, the cast of Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City represents one of the most faithful visual recreations of the series, even if the characterizations took some swings. The costumes were spot-on. The weapons were correct. The keys had the suits on them.
If you're a fan of the franchise, it's worth re-watching the film specifically to see how the actors interpret these iconic roles without the "superhero" lens of the previous films. They feel like real people who are out of their depth, which is exactly what survival horror is supposed to be about.
If you want to dive deeper into the performances, here is what you should do:
- Watch the "making of" featurettes: The cast talks extensively about playing the games. Most of them actually did their homework.
- Compare the Jill/Wesker dynamic: Watch the Spencer Mansion scenes again. Tom Hopper and Hannah John-Kamen play those moments with a specific tension that foreshadows the future of the series.
- Check out the actors' other work: To see why they were cast, watch Kaya Scodelario in Crawl or Avan Jogia in Zombieland: Double Tap. You’ll see the DNA of their Resident Evil characters in those roles.
The movie might be divisive, but the talent on screen was undeniable. It’s a snapshot of a town on the brink of collapse, played by people who clearly cared about the source material, even when the script was moving at 100 miles per hour.