Guys I’ve been following a tutorial to build a ThirdPerson game and I cannot cast from a menu Widget to Player Character. Here is how the event graph of the Widget looks like:
Do anyone know why? Thank you!
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Does the player exist at this point?
Pawn has to exist.
From Controller class… Get Controlled Pawn → Is Valid [valid] → Cast
Hey @yujiaoshou — this is a super common hiccup when working with widgets in Blueprints, especially early on 
Why Your Cast Is Probably Failing
When you’re inside a Widget Blueprint, and try to cast to the Player Character, your “target” is likely not set correctly.
If you’re using something like Get Owning Player → that gives you the Player Controller, not the Character directly.
So if you try:
blueprint
CopyEdit
Cast To MyCharacter (target: Get Owning Player)
…it fails, because you’re casting a Controller to a Character, and they are separate classes in Unreal.
2 Ways to Fix It
Method 1: Go through the Controller
blueprint
CopyEdit
Get Owning Player → Get Controlled Pawn → Cast to MyCharacter
- This works because:
Get Owning Playerreturns the ControllerGet Controlled Pawngets the Player Character the Controller is possessing
Method 2: Use “Get Player Character”
blueprint
CopyEdit
Get Player Character → Cast to MyCharacter
- This one is simpler and usually works fine if you’re only dealing with one player (like in single-player games)
Bonus: Keep Track of Fixes Like This
If you’re working on a growing project, you’ll hit this casting pattern often — especially when passing data between menus, characters, game modes, etc.
To stay organized, we use a tool we built called Asset Optics that lets us:
Leave notes like “This widget uses Controller → Pawn → Character casting”- Track which widgets or scripts need refactoring or cleanup
Sync that info to a web dashboard so you’re not chasing random bugs weeks later
It’s helped us a ton with keeping UI logic cleaner across large BP graphs.