Hypothetical Movie Jury Casting

[Dr. Sylvan]

Here's a hypothetical for TMD's best & brightest movie fans: If you were casting a hypothetical movie centering on a twelve-person jury, who would you cast in the jurors and why? I saw this discussion topic go well on another forum, so I thought I'd float it here.

Some things to consider:

Ensemble cast - This exercise is more interesting if you can make a case that the actors and actresses involved wouldn't collide with eath other stylistically. This is also a way to separate this hypothetical scenario from a simple listing of your "Top Ten" favorite actors/actresses.

Diversity - As much as it'd be easy to pick a dozen of the last twenty people to win Oscars for Best Actor/Actress, one way to keep entries interesting is to avoid the winners of these biggest awards, reducing overlap. It also helps to avoid the white hegemony that can accidentally creep into these lists.

Here's my entry:

Linda Cardellini (Freaks & Geeks (TV))
John Cusack (High Fidelity)
Embeth Davidtz (Schindler's List)
Aaron Eckhart (Thank You For Smoking)
Ralph Fiennes (Quiz Show)
Morgan Freeman (Shawshank Redemption)
Allison Janney (The West Wing (TV), Juno)
Elizabeth Mitchell (Lost (TV))
Edward James Olmos (Battlestar Galactica)
Elizabeth Pena (Tortilla Soup, The Incredibles)
Stellan Skarsgard (Good Will Hunting)
Maura Tierney (Primary Colors)

I like this group because it has a mix of people who I could see as leading characters with lots of dialogue (Fiennes, Cusack, Olmos, Tierney) and a whole bunch of people who are amazing at making scenes better whenever they're in them (Davidtz, Freeman, Janney, Mitchell, Skarsgard). There's also potential for contrast between hotheads (Cusack, Eckhart, Fiennes, Pena) and calmness (Freeman, Mitchell, Skarsgard, Tierney) which is pretty important to create conflict in a jury scenario.

Also, in the vein of the "ensemble cast" mentioned above, most movies and TV shows portraying juries only emphasize a few jurors, but picking a full dozen is only meaningful if all of them could make their characters interesting with a few minutes of screen time each. The parenthetically noted roles above stood out as interesting characters to me the first time I saw them within the first few minutes.

Alternative ideas?

[Matt]

Twelve clones of Will Smith.

"Does the jury find the defendant guilty?"
"AW HELL NAW"

[Grand Inquisitor]

needs more clive owen

that guy exudes reasonable doubt

[M.Solymossy]

Chuck Norris... x12.

these jokes died 3 years ago!

[vartemis]

Chuck Norris... x12.

I don't know if that would work, because Chuck would ultimately be the judge, jury, and executioner.

j

[Anusien]

Edward James Olmos, Aaron Eckhart, and Morgan Freeman are good choices; I'd also like to see some Denzel Washington and Gina Torres.  Linda Cardellini is an awesome choice not only because she's cute but because she has curly hair and that's rare; Jessica Szohr also looks similar and has played a similar personality.
I'd like to either Raquel Alessi or Emmanuelle Chriqui.

Other fantastic actors/actresses:
Jason Segel/Seth Rogen
Cobie Smulders/Missy Peregrym
Blake Lively/Hayden Panettiere
Felicia Day
Jeffrey Donovan
Seth Green
Edward Norton
Kevin Smith would be hilarious to have on as well.

That's 15, so there's room to cull.