I was watching Dreamgirls last night, and was bothered for the whole two hours by the fact that the guy who played Effie’s brother CC looked so damned familiar. Every scene he was in – and he was in quite a few – I’d get pulled out of the movie for a second to think “Who the hell is that?” Checking the box and, by process of elimination, figuring out the actor’s name was Keith Robinson didn’t do a bit of good.
Looked him up on IMDb this morning, and it turns out he played That Nice Black Boy on the TV show American Dreams, a two-season guilty pleasure of mine.
When’s the last time you had to look up an actor’s listing on IMDb to figure out why you recognized him or her?
I think the most recent imdb lookup was to figure out why the squad sergeant who got laser slice-and-diced in the first *Resident Evil * movie was so damn familiar to me. It was Colin Salmon, a black British actor known for playing M’s assistant in the Pierce Brosnan Bond movies. He was doing an American accent in the Resident Evil movie and that’s what threw me.
Although after I post this, I am going to imdb to look up the cast list of the BBC Hogfather, which I managed to catch on the ION channel over the holiday. About 3/4’s of the way through, I piped up, “Hey, I think Ridcully was the Russian ambassador in The Hunt for Red October.”
I do it all the freaking time. There’s just too many Hey It’s That Guys. A lot of times I find it so distracting that I pause the movie and haul out the laptop.
I had to go to IMDb to find out that one of the cute Milwaukee girls in “Love Actually” is January Jones, aka Betty Draper in “Mad Men”, one of my favorite shows from this season.
You have just experienced the phenomenon known as Hey! It’s that Guy! The late, lamented Fametracker.com (the farmer’s almanac of celebrity worth) regularly profiled such actors in their eponymous regular feature. sniff
Once upon a time, for instance Tony Shaloub (now of Monk fame) was a Hey! Its that Ethnic Guy!
Nah – I think of “Hey It’s that Guy” as involving someone you see over and over again – like Ronnie Cox in your link.
This is a one-off of some secondary character in a movie almost-but-not-quite reminding you of some fairly obscure character in another show that no one but you ever watched.
