Which bothers you more when print is translated into tv show or movie:
when the character doesn’t look like the book says they do?
when the character isn’t the age the book gives?
For me, it’s definitely the latter. It’s okay to cast someone older or younger than the character, as long as they look the age the character ought to be. It bothers me on True Blood that Andy Bellefleur is portrayed by a actor who is more than 10 years older than the character should be and looks his age. Andy was supposed to have gone to school with Jason, but graduated earlier than him. Jason is 28/29, so at very most Andy is supposed to be my age, not in his early 40s.
The actors chosen for Lily and James Potter’s former classmates are all too old too, and that has always bugged me about the Harry Potter movies. The boy in the upcoming adaptation of The Road by Cormac McCarthy is much too old as well.
On the other hand, I don’t worry so much about characters who don’t look like their book descriptions. The only time it has ever really bothered me at all is the fact that all the kids in The Thorn Birds were supposed to be redheads, as is mentioned repeatedly in the book, and none were in the mini-series. Most of the time I don’t get a very good mental picture of characters as I read, so it’s easier to shrug that off.
It’s funny you mentioned the “Harry Potter” movies - since one of the actors in the second movie was 25 years (!) older than the character being portrayed (she did look the right age).
I tend to be forgiving of age differences between book and adaptation, because it’s hard to find good actors of the right age sometime, but plot-relevant looks are important - Walter Kovacs needs to be a short weasely looking guy.
I think it’s the looks that bug me more. I’ve seen books where the guy is described as an African American and is played by a Latino.
I tend to be picky though. I read a book about a Puerto Rican and it was played by a Mexican and that bugged me too.
The worst were the old movies, you read the book and the character in the movie looks nothing like the book. This was probably due to the fact in the old days a studio bought the book rights and used whatever actors they had in their stable.
Age sometimes works, as in Wizard of Oz, where in the book Dorothy was a little girl. Or in Grease, which is a play, but all the actors in Grease were way too old.
Well, the actress playing Moaning Myrtle needed to be an adult so that her looks wouldn’t change in subsequent films. I’m sure J. K. Rowling probably tipped them off about that.
Any version of Stoker’s DRACULA which drops Renfield, which is AFAIK three- the first Lee-Cushing one HORROR OF DRACULA (1958), the 1973 Dan Curtis TV production starring Jack Palance, and the BBC-PBS 2007 Masterpiece Theatre version.
Interestingly, the second Lee DRACULA movie, D… PRINCE OF DARKNESS, did have a Renfield-esque character named Ludwig. Also, the 1977 Louis Jourdan BBC-PBS production had a VERY good Renfield.
Doesn’t bother me either way. Oh, occasionally you’ll have a person of the wrong age cast (Albert Finney in Scrooge, for instance), but it ultimately depends on the actor’s talent (Finney fails as Scrooge not because he was too young for the role (34), but because he had all the bad actor’s mannerisms of playing an older character).
Definitely age of the two mentioned, although I’ll add in a “beauty difference”. When the character is much better looking in the movie.
Matthew McConaughey is the king of these. Two examples:
As Palmer Joss in CONTACT. Jodie Foster was actually perfect for Ellie- she didn’t look like Ellie’s description exactly but she conveyed the obvious raw and refined intelligence, skepticism and curiosity which was really more important for the character. In the book however, Palmer Joss was a middle aged man with a torso covered in tattoos (courtesy of a youthful stint as a carnival huckster) and though extremely well informed on religious and political matters he was mostly autodidactic. In the movie he’s Matthew McConaughey, who somehow goes from questioning grad student to- literally- a spiritual advisor to presidents all by the time he’s in his early 30s.
McConaughey’s first major starring role was in A Time to Kill playing a 30-something “average Joe” looking lawyer and of course he was in his 20s (with a 10 year old child that was born after the character became a lawyer) and of course looked like Matthew McConaughey. McConaughey’s about midway between the best and the worst actors in Hollywood, but it’s irritating that he gets such good characters because he’s got great buns and a fratboy smile.
Another example using much less conventionally pretty “too pretty” people- if a remake can count as a transition- is ON GOLDEN POND. Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn were absolutely perfect as Norman and Ethel Thayer, you completely believed them as an upper middle class couple who’d been together and driving each other nuts for half a century. When it was remade for television with Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer (hyped because it was the first time they’d worked together since SOUND OF MUSIC), neither actor was really too young for the part- they were younger than Fonda/Hepburn but only by a few years- but they were both far too well preserved, glamorous, “enhanced”, and in Andrews’ case too English for the roles. (For a woman who became world famous for playing a Cockney it may be an odd question, but is Julie Andrews capable of any accent other than her own? She played a New England missionary [and daughter of Carroll O’Connor] in HAWAII, a New England housewife in OGP, the queen of a small European country in PRINCESS DIARIES, an American psychiatrist in one movie and a California housewife in another- and they all have the same [admittedly loverly] genteel English accent.)
OTOH, a “beauty” difference can work if the actor has talent to “become” the character. The first five words of GONE WITH THE WIND are “Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful”, a phrase you simply couldn’t make of Vivien Leigh, but her performance was deservedly iconic: you almost had the opinion that on any difference twixt Leigh’s character and Mitchell’s character it was Mitchell who erred. Leslie Howard meanwhile was WAY too old to play Ashley Wilkes- he wasn’t a bad looking man but he was in his 40s and he looked it, and it’s hard to believe any pampered teenager (Leigh wasn’t a teenager but was convincing as one, and was about the right age for Scarlett by the end of the movie) would carry such a torch for a middle aged man who has all the charisma of a sick Bassett Hound.
Such as? (Not arguing, just curious- though I’ll admit I liked his performance, save perhaps for his “old” voice- most people’s voices don’t change that much twixt 30 and 60 [or whatever the age difference was between his last young scene and his present].)
I just read the the book A Christmas Carol and I’m pretty sure it doesn’t give an age for him. When the Ghost of Christmas Present Visits him he sees his ex-fiancee with small children and we know Marley has been dead seven years.
You may be right but I don’t know how to go about estimating Scrooge’s age. Hmmm
I can’t remember what it is, but there’s a line somewhere towards the beginning that suggests he’s between his early 40s and early 50s. Far younger than he’s often cast as.
Neither of them. I’m more concerned that the plot matches the book (certain artistic or cinematic licences notwithstanding).
For example, in the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy book (and Radio show, and TV series), Ford Prefect is a rather odd-looking alien from Betelgeuse. No race is given but the actor in the Radio and TV series was caucasian, and I’ve always imagined the character in the book as being the same.
But the movie version had Mos Def (a black actor) cast as Ford Prefect, and you know what? It worked really well.
The actual, physical appearance of the character is largely immaterial IMHO as long as they react the same and have the same role in the movie as they do in the book. YRMV, of course.
It’s the last of the Christmas Past visions, and set when Marley is just about to die. From the previous vision we know that Scrooge was a man “in the prime of life” while his bride was young (the Patrick Stewart version got this wrong) and we know she is about twice her previous age from the presence of a daughter who looks like she used to. So she might be rising forty at the time of Marley’s death, and in her middle forties when the story begins, which would allow Scrooge to be close to sixty at least. It’s quite possible he appears prematurely aged by his meanness and bitterness, of course.
Except in comic book or graphic novel adaptations. Being visual mediums, they should get someone as close to the character depicted and I’m still slightly annoyed by Michael Clarke Duncan in DareDevil. He was more than passable and he was obviously cast because of their similar builds, but the Kingpin’s white and still wish they’d been able to find someone else that looked more like Wilson Fisk does in the comics.
Aside from his skin color, Michael Clarke Ducan looks exactly like Wilson Fisk did in the comics. I’ve heard this complaint before, and I understand it, but Duncan is the only actor who could have pulled off Kingpin in my mind.
I really wish he’d show up in a Spider-Man sequel.
The 1997 made-for-TV movie, The Odyssey, cast Isabella Rossellini as Athena. She did a fine job, but what annoyed me was an interview I read with the producers saying that they had to guess about her appearance. For some reason, the example they gave was that no one knows what color Athena’s eyes were. Ironically, that’s the one feature of Athena’s that is prominent in the literature. Athena is almost always described as having gray eyes. (Ms. Rossellini’s are blue, IIRC.)
I’m actually pretty lenient when they adapt literary characters into film form. Because obviously no actor is ever going to completely match the description or the imagined appearance of a fictional character. However, if there is a feature about a character that DEFINES them or their story then it needs to stay. My biggest pet peeve is Asian characters. And the biggest one of all was the Memoirs of a Geisha movie.
Geisha are Japanese. The characters in the book are Japanese. The story is set in Japan. Yet they cast mainly Chinese actors for the movie. It annoyed me so much that I still refuse to watch the movie. Yes, I know that most Americans can’t tell the difference between different Asian ethnicities but I can and it drives me crazy when they continually cast Chinese/Korean actors to play Japanese roles. In fact, it seems to mainly happen ONLY with Japanese characters. And I don’t understand why. Is there a shortage of good Japanese actors in America? Or maybe the Chinese ones just have a better union.
Ha. When I was watching this movie, I kept thinking “Isn’t this supposed to take place in Japan, not China? Why is the main character not Japanese?” It didn’t surprise me at all to find out that a lot of people were upset by the fact that the actress was Chinese. I think more people can tell than you might suppose.
Good to see I’m not being overly anal over this. Or if I am, other people are too. I do think though, that the movie companies bet on the fact that the majority of people can’t tell the difference, or just don’t care.
According to the IMDB, Duncan was the only person they could find with the requisite build who could act worth a damn. Then again, also according to the IMDB, they did audition at least a somewhat significant number of pro wrestlers…