TITANS Casting: Raven is First to Play
Deadline was the first to report that Australian actress Teagan Croft is the first to join the cast of the live-action Titans, based on the DC Comics team of superhero sidekicks. The 13-year-old Croft will play Raven, daughter of the demon Trigon and a powerful empath.
The show has been anticipated by many since we first heard about it in 2014. According to an early report in The Wall Street Journal, Akiva Goldsman and Marc Haimes were to write the pilot, with Goldsman on board as a producer. That version of the show would have lived at TNT, but when the network brought in new president Kevin Reilly, the project became a victim of the network’s new focus on dramas like Animal Kingdom and Good Behavior, both crime-oriented.
Early rumors had the team’s line-up as Robin (Dick Grayson), Starfire, Barbara Gordon, Raven, Hawk and Dove. Originally set in Boston, the show would have seen Barbara in her Oracle persona, but that has since changed so that Batgirl is on the roster now.
The casting of a 13-year-old as Raven would seem to indicate that this iteration of the Teen Titans may fall in line with what we’ve seen in recent animated outings where Nightwing and Starfire are the older mentors to younger teens that include Raven, Beast Boy, Terra, and (freshly revealed in time for the upcoming sequel) Wonder Girl — who looks a lot like Donna Troy.
Since then, the project gained a second chance with Greg Berlanti and Geoff Johns putting on producer hats along with Goldsman and Berlanti’s co-producer on Arrow, Sarah Schechter. The show will now be part of the lineup for the new DC-branded direct digital service that will also be home to season three of Young Justice.
This marks Croft’s debut in the United States, with her only other credits being the low-budget Australian production Science Fiction Volume One: The Osiris Child from Storm Vision Entertainment and the series Home and Away, which has been running on 7 Network in Australia since 1988.
Could the show be aiming toward the same target audience scoped out by Marvel’s Runaways, Shadowhunters, Marvel’s Cloak & Dagger, The Shannara Chronicles, and Teen Wolf?
