Thinking movies, television, and theatre, what actors have portrayed supposedly smart characters with the most verisimilitude?
Note that I am not asking about the actor’s intelligence (though I suppose it’s hard to decouple the two), nor about the quality of the writing. In other words, you can think that Tamara Taylor is believable as a seriously smart forensic pathologist even if you think the science on Bones is better described as alchemy.
Speaking of forensic pathologist, I’ll nominate David McCallum (Ducky on NCIS) and Leslie Hendrix (Rogers on Law & Order). They’re both believable as people who have tons and tons of arcane information in their heads, both in their professional fields and outside of it.
Much of the cast of The West Wing (including but not limited to Martin Sheen, Allison Janney, and Richard Schiff).
David Krumholtz (as Charlie Eppes on Numb3rs) gets points for portraying a brilliant mathematician who is neither mentally ill nor hopelessly nerdy and clueless about the real world.
Yeah, Aaron Sorkin’s actors are universally excellent at communicating intellect. Jesse Eisenberg’s performance in “The Social Network” is the latest (and maybe greatest). How much of it is writing and how much comes from Sorkin’s influence on casting and direction is unclear to me.
Summer Glau is someone who does the “brilliant but crazy” thing really well.
He’s certainly a much more realistic character than Sheldon Cooper. As irritating as the character of Wes was in being inserted into stories he really had no place in, the CHARACTER was well realized and very well acted by Wil Wheaton. He’s a very bright teenager without being stereotypical or yet another everyone-on-the-autistic-spectrum-bandwagon character.
A neat little recurring bit about Wes is his disinterest in academic subjects that aren’t scientific - especially history, which is Picard’s first love and so is a (gentle) point of conflict between them. Wesley isn’t inept and averse to anything non-sciency the way a show with a Asperger’s person would be, a la Big Bang Theory (Asperger’s: It’s the new ADHD!) Rather, it’s simply not Wesley’s particular bag of chips; his interests go in one direction, Picard’s another, which makes the stand-in-father-son dynamic between them all the more interesting and realistic.
Meh, Sheldon did OK in the first season, but after that, they apparently decided “having poor social skills” == “is indistinguishable from a four year old”.
Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes. It’s not all in the writing, either. One of the things I never much liked Basil Rathbone’s Holmes is that he doesn’t come off as terrifically brilliant - it feels more like he’s simply read the script already. Brett actually figured things out.
I thought Parker Stevenson did a decent job on Probe. Fell into the standard Asimov template of being emotionally cold, but that wasn’t surprising.
Also, most of the characters in Real Genius. Chris Knight is a particular standout.
I didn’t even think about Picard, but you’re right. I always had the feeling that, even more than having tons of experience, he was simply smarter than any of his officers (with the exception of Data, who is so different than humans that it’s hard to make a comparison). None of his officers, not even Data, would have figured out how to communicate with Tamarians in “Darmok.”
With regards to the Picard-Wesley conflict, while I think it existed, I think Rickjay is wrong about Picard’s concerns. He believed (and I agree) that even if Wesley went the science-engineering route in his Starfleet career, he was going to screw himself if he didn’t know more about history.
I guess I should qualify this by saying that I know the character is written his way, but Hugh Laurie really knows how to deliver the humor, arrogance and sarcasm that makes this character’s intelligence completely plausible.
Clark Peters (Lester Freeman) and Jim True-Frost (Prezbo) on The Wire. Though you couldn’t call either of them geniuses, they played characters who had an amazing talent for solving puzzles and finding solutions. The fact that they had some serious judgment flaws sometime made it all the more plausible.
Them too, of course. One of my favorite moments in the show is when Sheldon has come up with an algorithm, shown as a flowchart on a whiteboard, for making friends. When he tries to use it and it goes wrong, Howard gets up, erases part of the flowchart, and then replaces it with more flowcharting to fix the problem. Not only is that nerdy and intelligent, it’s also a flavor of nerdiness and intelligence which is very characteristic of an engineer.
Tony Shalhoub’s *Adrian Monk. *At first I was reluctant to include him because of all of the character’s neuroses, but then I remembered the episode when his OCD was temporarily cured, and he lost his skills. So the OCD can be considered part of his genius, rather than working against it.