Antonio de Padua María Severino López de Santa Anna y Pérez de Lebrón was born in 1794. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_López_de_Santa_Anna) At the time of the Battle of the Alamo (1836), he was 42 years old.
In the 2004 film The Alamo (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0318974/), the part of Santa Anna was played by Emilio Echevarria. I don’t know how old he is – the IMDB bio on him is almost blank – but in that film, he sure looked a lot older than 42. Why didn’t they cast somebody younger?!
Nobody knows?
Because they liked the way he looked, and the way he played the part.
That’s all that’s really important in a movie.
What? A Hollywood “historical” movie where an actor wasn’t the actual age of the character he portrayed?!?!? No! Tell me it’s not so!
Next thing, you’ll be telling me Hidalgo and Fargo aren’t actual true stories!
In Lord of the Rings the book, Frodo was 50 years old, settled into a comfortable middle-aged life, a pillar of his community. This is absolutely central and critical to the burden placed on him to give up all that comfort and go off on an almost-certainly-doomed mission.
In Lord of the Rings the movie, they cast Elijah Wood, who won’t hit puberty for another decade.
What was your point again?
Wouldn’t a 42 year old, in the 1800s, who had lived a solider’s life, look older than how we would envision a 42 year old in 2006?
This is almost standard issue. There’s a new movie about the Mountain Meadows Massacre called September Dawn . The leader of the attack was John D. Lee, who was 45, is played by Jon Voight, who is 67. In the stills I’ve seen Brigham Young, who is portrayed by Terence Stamp, who is 66 (10 years older than Young was at the time of the crime), looks like this picture of Young when in fact Young was cleanshaven at the time and looked like this. In a miniseries about George Washington some while ago Barry Bostwick played GW while Hal Holbrook, who is 20 years his senior, played John Adams, who was 3 years Washington’s junior.
In The Crucible (which is of course not intended as biography) the character of John Proctor’s age is reduced by half (the real man was about 60 [though he did have a pregnant wife]) while temptress Puritan Lolita Abigail’s age is raised from 11 to 17, and of course there was no affair between them in real life. It’s done for dramatic effect. Movies do things the same way, plus there’s the issue of wanting name actors or at least good actors who look the part (in Santa Anna’s case a politically brilliant militarily incompetent thoroughly arrogant peasant peacock) rather than 100% accuracy.
I didn’t see the flick, was there any plot point about him being old or frail? If not, then it likely was as RealityChuck says, they just liked him in that part.
Well, what I found jarring about it was that the film’s Santa Anna appeared to be an elder statesman/caudillo whose career arc had already peaked, like Castro today. In fact, Santa Anna, at that time, still had a long and tempestuous career in front of him. He was president/dictator of Mexico seven times between 1833 and 1855, and did not die until 1876.
Along with the other historical inaccuracies of the Disney film, the real Pocahantas was only around eleven when she met John Smith.
Tom Sawyer, while a fictional character, would portrayed as a man in his mid-twenties (Actor Shane West was 25) in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Considering his childhood adventures, as recorded by Mark Twain, occurred in the 1840’s, he would been an old man by 1898 when the movie was set.
“Everybody does it” is no defense.
I guess the Santa Anna thing got to me because it seemed like, for the most part, they were trying to pay a lot more attention to historical accuracy (or at least period verisimilitude) than, say, the 1960 version with John Wayne. So it was really jarring for them to get something so basic so wrong.
That kind of bugged me as well, then I realized that the movie makes no references to anything from the Twain books… so I just assumed this is THE Tom Sawyer’s grandson. (and by ‘assumed’ I mean tried to make sense of a trainwreck.)
Ayuh. We’re talking about a movie where the Venice Carnival (another name for Mardi Gras) is in July, and the Venetian canals are broad and deep enough to accommodate a submarine the size of a modern aircraft carrier. Not to mention the existence of vampirism, etc., etc. The concept of “historical accuracy” hardly seems relevant. But to The Alamo, it should be relevant.
Maybe not, but it certainly answers your question as to “why”. More specifically, they couldn’t find anyone better who was a closer age. Why does this surprise you?
Incidentally the guy only looks to be in his fifties, early sixties at most so the difference of a decade isn’t exactly jarring. I also agree that a person living around the turn of the 19th century would look much older than it’s modern equivalent. Having a 42 year old actor playing would have looked way too young.
Hell, I was just delighted that at last they let Crockett have his long hair, parted in the middle instead of Parker’s pompadour or Wayne’s wig.
Now, if they had only given Thornton a prosthetic long skinny hooked nose, we’d be in business…
Sir Rhosis
Also, it hasn’t been mentioned yet, and probably isn’t that important, but this fellow was not only a career military officer, but one who lived in a region not exactly known for it’s skin-friendly climates. We’re talking hot, dry weather in many of the places he’d find himself around then (though when he briefly visited San Jacinto, he probably would have found it uncomfortably humid, as that entire portion of Texas has tended to be in my experience.)
Oh, and random hijack/observation about The Alamo…
Is it POSSIBLE for Marc Blucas to get cast in a war movie where he doesn’t get killed? I saw him towards the begining of The Alamo and thought “Yep, he’s dead.” 
Who the fuck is Marc Blucas? 
He wasn’t anyone particularly important in The Alamo, but in We Were Soldiers, he played the lieutenant of the platoon that gets cut off from everyone else.
He also played a secret government operative (and college TA) on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Freddie on Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.
