As announced on July 16, the two lead actors for the upcoming live-action movie “The Legend of Zelda” have been cast. The title princess will be played by British actress Bo Bragason, and the heroic warrior Link will be played by the equally British Benjamin Evan Ainsworth. Both actors are quite young and, to date, only have brief resumes. Ainsworth’s highest-profile gig — at least the one that American readers would most readily recognize — was playing the voice of the lead character in Robert Zemeckis’ live-action/CGI Disney remake of “Pinocchio. Bragason, meanwhile, has appeared mostly on-screen in her native England, boasting a small role in the Shudder-released 2021 horror film “Censor,” which was about the notorious Video Nasties.
Wes Ball’s “The Legend of Zelda” will, of course, be based on the video game first published by Nintendo in 1986. The games are fantasy epics about a sword-wielding paladin who traverses a fantasy kingdom searching for dungeons and the magical Triforce pieces that lie therein. He must ultimately rescue the Princess Zelda from the clutches of an evil pig-like wizard named Ganon. There have been 19 additional “Zelda” games since 1986, and the two main characters have evolved considerably in that time. Some iterations of the character are lanky and mature, while others are squat and comedic. The most recent game in the series was called “The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom,” and it was released in 2024. It remains unclear which versions of Zelda and Link that Ainsworth and Bragason will be playing.
By coincidence, “The Legend of Zelda” will not be the first time Bragason has worked on a feature film based on a video game. Back in 2016, when she was only 12, Bragason provided some of the motion-capture movements for the 12-year-old version of a character named Luna in the Japanese CGI film “Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV.”
