I’m in no way a fan of the movie Troy, but ever since I watched it many years ago, it has defined how I picture some of the characters from the Illiad in my mind. Achilles will always be Brad Pitt for me, and Hector is Eric Bana. Agamemnon will forever look like Brian Cox, so much so that whenever I see Mr. Cox in anything else, I’ll automatically say “hey, Agamemnon is in this movie”, rather than “Brian Cox is in this”.
(Not all of them have stuck, though. The chick they got to play Helen was eminently forgettable, and she certainly wasn’t up to the task of launching any great number of ships. But anyway.)
Similarly, the TV series I, Claudius has defined how I picture a bunch of the Julio-Claudians and their crazy friends. It’s impossible for me to imagine the emperor Claudius as someone separate from Derek Jacobi, and Sejanus of course looks like Jean-Luc Picard (well, only with hair). I think the only character from that series that doesn’t define my mental image of their historical counterpart is Augustus as played by Brian Blessed. I picture Augustus as much slimmer and better looking, like the sculptures we have of him, and much less of a bumbling dad.
Surely, I’m not the only one who does this kind of thing. What are your examples?
George C Scott as Patton. And I suppose to a lesser extent Karl Malden as Omar Bradley. If I saw a picture of the real Patton and/or Bradley I probably wouldn’t even recognize them.
Daniel Day-Lewis looked like Abe, but I was not pleased with the voice. I had a bass in my mind for him.
If Moses didn’t look like Charlton Heston and Ramses like Yul Brynner then the casting agent would have to have been out to lunch. But Heston was also a convincing Andrew Jackson.
Howard da Silva is Benjamin Franklin.
Actually, it’s da Silva’s voice, since I’ve seen lots of Franklin’s likeness in drawings or pictures. This is pretty much the case with others, too , especially since we don’t have recordings in a lot of cases. Apparently Lincoln, Churchill, and Patton had much higher voices than we’d expect (or like), and Franklin didn’t speak very much in Congress at all (rather than the epigram-spouting paragon in 1776. Reality is less convincing than movies or plays.
(I’ve seen pictures of Patton – he’s nothing like George C. Scott, and looks significantly less sturdy)
Hal Holbrook, by the way, IS Mark Twain, voice and all, as far as my impressions go. How close to the real-life Twain he was, I do not know.
You’re not alone- a lot of people imagine Abe as a big guy with a booming voice.
Daniel Day-Lewis certainly COULD have given Abe a deep voice if he’d wanted to. But he’s a stickler for period detail- and while we have no recordings of Lincoln, many contemporary accounts indicated that the real Abraham Lincoln had a high, reedy voice. So, that’s the voice Day-Lewis went with in his portrayal.
For that matter, we DO have audio of George Patton, and he had a much thinner voice than George C. Scott- indeed, Patton sometimes sounded almost whiny when giving a speech.
Daniels is also Sam Adams and John Quincy Adams – he’s played them all, more than once. He has a lock on the Adams family. I knew Paul Giamatti had to be just an actor.
Staying with the ancients, a more recent one is of course Gerard Butler as king Leonidas in 300, a movie I have a love-hate relationship with (although I refuse to acknowledge that they ever made a sequel). There is no way I will ever again picture king Leonidas as anyone except this guy, which I suspect is true for an entire generation, or maybe a couple of generations.
(Which accounts for the “love” part of my love-hate relationship with 300. I think this is the first time since probably ancient Greece when you can walk up to any random 14-year-old on the street and ask him who Leonidas and the 300 Spartans were, and what they did, and instead of staring blankly at you, he’ll not only automatically know, but think they’re awesome. It’s a beautiful thing: A movie from the ancient world that doesn’t even have a sniff about it of some boring adult trying to teach you something. We need to tell stories from history more like that. Well, as long as we take out everything that was awful about that movie. But anyway, I digress.)
I hate to admit this, but I spent my first four decades within shouting distance of Gettysburg, PA; my Dad dragged us there dozens of times, but I couldn’t follow any of it. Put Jeff Daniels, Martin Sheen and Sam Elliott in a 4-hour film and I am hooked through the gills. Says more about me than the battle, though.
Nathan Fillion will always be Capt. Malcolm Reynolds.
Even when he is Castle and giving Beckett a hard time, it would never surprise me if he was wearing a brown coat and had the revolver strapped to his leg.
Particularly since they have referenced Firefly several times without actually saying the name.
