I had been wondering whatever happened to Nathan Fillion. Anybody who is a fan of Joss Whedon knows who he is - he was the right-hand man of the Big Bad in Season Seven of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and more prominently he was the lead in the one-season plus a movie series Firefly.
I had heard that Whedon was doing a version of MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING but I didn't have my hopes up enough to track it down because I was not happy with the Branagh version in the 1990s, and then I heard how Whedon had cast it and I was not happy at all. Fillion would have been perfect as Benedick - maybe the best ever - he's an absolute natural for the role. Instead he cast Alexis Denisof in the role. Denisof played Wesley Wyndam-Pryce on Buffy and Angel, and he never did it for me - not when he was bad-ass tragic vampire hunter and certainly not when he was a regular Percy Foppington when he was first introduced on Buffy.
Whedon cast Fillion as Dogberry.
I knew Fillion would have been perfect for the role and this was confirmed for me when I recently discovered what he has been doing these past five years - playing the lead in Castle, which is still ongoing.
Castle is no Buffy or Firefly, but it's a pretty good show. It's a comedy-drama-mystery show with a sexual tension subplot between Fillion's character, a wealthy best-selling mystery novelist, and a woman cop. And occasionally they make a nod towards Fillion's prior series as TV Tropes discusses - in the second season episode about a Halloween party Fillion's character is going as a "space cowboy" with an outfit that was right out of his Malcolm Reynolds' wardrobe - see below.
The show is no Weeds - I don't feel compelled to watch it, one episode after the other - I'm happy to see one episode per night. It's pretty funny at times though - I think they let Fillion ad-lib a bit.