When you visualize scenes from LOTR or Harry Potter do the characters in your minds eye now look like the actors in the movies or not?
For the most part in Harry Potter, they do. Though Voldemort I pictured with hair when he came back. And Dumbledore to me was Richard Harris, but not Michael Gambon.
My mind’s eye literary characters are usually faceless until I’ve seen depictions of them. Don’t ask me why; when I’m writing they all have faces.
Am I alone in this?
To be honest, no. Hermione in the books isn’t supposed to be as pretty as Emma Watson; I imagine her mousier. Daniel Radcliffe doesn’t quite match my mind’s-eye Harry, either. And I’ve always imagined Snape as being less greasy looking than the Alan Rickman version (though all the aforementioned actors do a very fine job indeed.)
Ron Weasley, though? Bang on. Rupert Grint is Ron Weasley to a T. God DAMN, that kid’s ugly.
Hmm, a slightly pudgy Dudley Moore remains my Bilbo.
But I think Frodo and Gandalf have switched.
For the LOTR, only Gandalf was as I pictured him. Gimli was close, Legolas was not.
Aragorn worked but not quite how I pictured him. Boromir was very close. Theoden I had pictured as an aging Sean Connery and so I was disappointed. Sam & Bilbo were good. Frodo was acceptable but too young looking.
The Elves just didn’t work, Galadriel came the closest but she wasn’t beautiful enough.
For Harry Potter: Radcliff is good because I based my image on the cover art.
Emma is too cute of a kid for Hermione.
I actually did picture Snape as Rickman, so that was dead on.
(Reading Jurassic Park I pictured Jeff Goldblum for the character description, every once in a while this happens).
Richard Harris was dead on, but old bearded wizards seem fairly easy.
I liked the casting of the movies. I did not have a good mines eye view of most of the characters and they fit.
I especially like Hagrid & Minerva McGonagall.
Jim
Radcliffe’s hair isn’t scruffy enough. Watson is too pretty - Hermione should have a long face, large teeth and be fairly tall and beanpole-ish. Grint is just right 
That said, I like all those actors in their roles and hope they stick it out through the entire series.
Richard Harris wouldn’t have been my first choice for Dumbledore. The voice was wrong, and he seemed too frail. Gambon at least seems like a more robust Dumbledore.
Harry Potter yes, since I saw the movie first.
LOTR - I know a lot of people disagree with Peter Jackson’s vision, but his vision coincided remarkably with my own. That is, I had already seen many of the characters almost as he casted them. I love the movies because I feel he saw through my eyes.
Same thing for me. I can tell you what they look like, sort of, but I don’t imagine the faces.
Hmmm… nope, not really. Frodo still has a stronger chin, Sam still has inexplicably reddish hair, Elrond still looks half-elven instead of 90% recycled post-consumer Hugo Weaving. In my mind’s eye, Eowyn is more… I dunno, shield-maidenly. Wilder and Valkyrie-like, I guess. Denethor has a neatly trimmed beard. And Wormtongue still looks like Keith Richards circa 1985 with RenFest hair.
About the only ones that really came close were Gandalf-- almost exactly right, except mine has a leaner face with a sharper nose-- and, surprisingly, Aragorn. I did some sketches of the LOTR characters once upon a time, and other than Viggo Mortensen’s unfortunate eyebrow problem, the Aragorn drawing could be of him.
And alas, my mental image of the Balrog looks rather fakier than Peter Jackson’s version. My imagination still relies largely on prosthetic makeup effects, it seems.
I have to thank PJ. Before, my mental picture of Merry and Pippin was not clear at all.
Otherwise, when I read the book, I flip back and forth between my 30 years of LOTR experience prior to the movie release, and my post-movie visualizations.
In other words: Yes lots! No, none at all!
Nope, although my mental images of the Harry Potter kids are influenced pretty heavily by Mary GrandPre’s illustrations. I haven’t seen the movies often enough for them to make an impression.
Yeah, I actually have a pretty bad visual imagination, which is probably why I almost always love movie adaptations of books.
For the Harry Potter series, Daniel Radcliffe and Rupert Grint are who I see when I read the books, Emma Watson less so, since Rowling’s descriptions of her really do differ from the actress. I am convinced that Rowling was already picturing Maggie Smith when she wrote McGonagall.
The only huge disconnect is Fleur (see my post in the new movie thread). Fleur’s main characteristic is her beauty and the actress just ain’t all that.
For the most part, yes. Snape, in particular, looks exactly like I imagined him. So similar, they might have read my mind. I haven’t seen Goblet of Fire yet, so I don’t know what they’ve made Voldemort look like. I’m curious to see, though. One minor difference is is that I didn’t imagine Wormtail looking so rattish. I know it fits with his animagus, but I imagined him as being more normal-looking, basically a short, dumpy, nondescript guy.
For LOTR, I think that Eowyn should have been a bit more more boyish in appearance. I mean, she managed to disguise herself as a (male) soldier and ride with them for days without anyone catching on. Plus, in the books, it’s pretty clear that she doesn’t think of herself as being an especially desirable lady.
All-in-all, however, I approve of the casting in both movie franchises.
I can’t speak to Potter, since all I’ve seen are (parts of) movies. I did think that Daniel Radcliffe did do a bang-up job of creating the Harry Potter character, though. (I tend to give child actors a lot of slack, but praise highly the ones who are seriously creating a memorable role. IMO, Radcliffe did just that.)
As for LOTR, all but three of the main characters were on target from my mind’s-eye versions. (PJ can expect a good caning in Purgatory from JRRT for what he did to Denethor, though.)
Viggo Mortenson was “off,” in my estimation, in creating the Tolkien Aragorn. He created a marvelous character, one with a great deal of depth, vulnerability, nobility, perseverance, and compassion. But it wasn’t the same person as Aragorn son of Arathorn from the books.
Sean Astin did something quite different with Samwise Gamgee than the character I knew from the books, but it was very much true to the character Tolkien created. Just a different interpretation of Sam-as-a-person than the one I’d visualized. And I’m very pleased at what he did.
The one character where my mind’s-eye figure and the PJ-movie actor were at greatest odds, though was Hugo Weaving’s Elrond. And in this case I yield 100% to PJ’s and Weaving’s vision. My Elrond was a rather distant if kindly figure, a living character out of legend. But Weaving portrayed a figure at once fairly young and virile and 7,000 years old, who has experienced epic events and been changed by them. An impossible character for an actor to create successfully, and yet somehow Weaving did it. It was quite literally a tour-de-force performance, which I think has been sadly neglected in handing out the praise for LOTR acting.
I saw FOTR first, and then went back and read the books before The Two Towers came out, but by then, the movie’s vision of the characters had indelibly etched themselves into my head. Not that I mind, since I prefer the movies over the books anyway. ducks
Oddly enough, even after seeing all four movies within the last year, my mental image of the Harry Potter characters is almost universally different from the movie portrayals. The only one that comes close is Gary Oldman’s Sirius Black, who basically stepped out of my mind unchanged anyway. If anything, my mental images are based on the paintings from the covers and chapter headers of the books.
Alan Rickman looks too old for my vision of Snape. (How old is he anyway? Better search. Born in 1946…older than I thought, but the point still stands.) He’s supposed to be in his forties, I think, since he went to school with Harry’s parents. Rickman is a great Snape; he just isn’t my Snape. I don’t think Emma Watson is as bad a choice for Hermione as most people seem to think. Hermione turns out to be pretty, after all. The only problem I have with Emma Watson is that she should have been “plained down” a little more to play Hermione.
Both movie series have affected my picture of the characters, but not completely.
I’ve never had really strong visual impressions of characters in books for some reason. I tend to have a vague idea of what they look like but it’s not very specific.
Frodo now looks a lot like Elijah Wood in my imagination even though I think he was only so-so as far as looking right for the part goes. Gandalf was almost perfect, but not quite. I liked Viggo as Aragorn and thought he captured the character well, but in my minds eye Aragorn is only sometimes Viggo. Sam is similar. Merry, Pippen, Gimli and Boromir fall in the category of characters who I didn’t really picture that way (less so with Gimli), but who work well, I don’t really picture them very specifically most of the time. Legolas, and to an extent, all of the elves were fine, but they didn’t really capture what elves are like in my mind, which is to say hard to truly imagine since they are so angelic.
I think Ron and Harry of the movie are pretty close to my image of them from the book, but not exactly and I notice that. I’m at a loss to figure out how they should have portrayed Hermione. I imagined her as pretty when i read the books, but the sort of pretty that you don’t necessarily catch, especially if you are Harry or Ron’s age. Emma Watson isn’t so bad as far as things go, but she is too obviously pretty. Hermione of the books was a nerd with frizzy hair and big teeth.
I thought Snape wasn’t greasy enough, but Alan Rickman is great as Snape nevertheless. I loved Hagrid.
I’m not much of a visual thinker; most of my fiction reading is done without acting out scenes in my head. Certainly I can’t say that actors’ faces are blank for me, I just don’t really have any images at all. That said, the two referenced movies do bring to mind some discrepency between my thought and actor representation.
Robbie Coltrane does a pretty fair job with Hagrid, so what criticism I have is placed more squarely on directors and special effects wizards: Hagrid is not nearly as large as the book depicts him. He’s supposed to be half-giant, but he comes across more like an extraordinarily - but not impossibly - large man.
I despised Elijah Wood as Frodo. I never thought of Frodo as a burly man-among-men, but Wood plays him like an utter sissy. Ugh. I suppose this isn’t all appearance, but it is partly the fault of appearance. Give the man a little stubble. Better yet, have someone play Frodo that doesn’t look like he was beat up every day throughout High School.
Speaking of stubble … Viggo Mortenson doesn’t do well with it. Any vestigial regality that Aragorn should have possessed was dashed to the wind by inability-to-grow-a-beard syndrome. I too have that syndrome - I understand what ill effects it can have on the spirit of a man - but one with such an affliction must face his shortcomings and keep a razor close at hand.
Prior to the LOTR movies, I pictured all the hobbits as brown-haired and brown-eyed; the first time I watched Fellowship, it surprised me to see Frodo with blue eyes. Now, when I read the books, I see the hobbits as they appear in the movies.