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Onscreen heroes and villains
Jul. 8th, 2010 01:14 amWhat I find odd is that actors known for playing villains most of the time who sometimes play good guys or romantic leads don't really make an impact on me (in most cases, they make me totally root for them in the film XDD). However, I've realised that watching an actor who you're used to seeing as a good guy play a villain/baddie is utterly bizarre.
Take the example of Alan Rickman who's basically the best and well-known onscreen villain ever (e.g. Hans Gruber and The Sheriff of Nottingham)...once he started playing Jamie in Truly Madly Deeply or Colonel Brandon (♥) in Sense and Sensibility, he was instantly the one you liked and you didn't bat an eyelid as to how strange or unusual it is to see him play a totally different role to which he usually did.
I watched Patriot Games the other day (yes, the one with Harrison Ford and Sean Bean) and what I found so odd was seeing Hugh Fraser (who I confess was one of the reasons why I wanted to watch this film; the other was of course his Sharpe costar Sean Bean XD) playing a trusted British secretary to a peer who later turns out to be not so trustworthy and ends up betraying Ford and his employer. You see, I'm just so utterly used to his Captain Hastings in Poirot who is so utterly incapable of betraying or killing anyone in cold blood (seriously he even thinks looking through keyholes and reading other people's letters as 'not playing the game') so to see him do both these things was weird. Also seeing him basically being beaten up, roughly thrown against walls and down the stairs (the latter job is something that Hastings sometimes finds himself doing) and being shot in the knee by Harrison Ford was strange too. Also the fact that his character is accidentally killed by Sean Bean later on didn't help...I just ended up thinking: 'OMG, Sharpe has just shot and killed Wellington!'
It seems that these actors are just waaay too fixed in my mind in their particular roles for me to accept them as anything else XDDD
Take the example of Alan Rickman who's basically the best and well-known onscreen villain ever (e.g. Hans Gruber and The Sheriff of Nottingham)...once he started playing Jamie in Truly Madly Deeply or Colonel Brandon (♥) in Sense and Sensibility, he was instantly the one you liked and you didn't bat an eyelid as to how strange or unusual it is to see him play a totally different role to which he usually did.
I watched Patriot Games the other day (yes, the one with Harrison Ford and Sean Bean) and what I found so odd was seeing Hugh Fraser (who I confess was one of the reasons why I wanted to watch this film; the other was of course his Sharpe costar Sean Bean XD) playing a trusted British secretary to a peer who later turns out to be not so trustworthy and ends up betraying Ford and his employer. You see, I'm just so utterly used to his Captain Hastings in Poirot who is so utterly incapable of betraying or killing anyone in cold blood (seriously he even thinks looking through keyholes and reading other people's letters as 'not playing the game') so to see him do both these things was weird. Also seeing him basically being beaten up, roughly thrown against walls and down the stairs (the latter job is something that Hastings sometimes finds himself doing) and being shot in the knee by Harrison Ford was strange too. Also the fact that his character is accidentally killed by Sean Bean later on didn't help...I just ended up thinking: 'OMG, Sharpe has just shot and killed Wellington!'
It seems that these actors are just waaay too fixed in my mind in their particular roles for me to accept them as anything else XDDD
