Which movie character nailed or screwed your image of them, if you read the book before seeing the movie?

[nice90sguy]

Raymond Chandler famously said that Dick Powell, who'd been previously known as a juvenile lead in fluffy musicals, ended up a better Philip Marlowe than Humphrey Bogart - closer to to the author's image.

I think "Professor McGonagall" did it for me, with Maggie Smith basically revising her Jean Brodie role.

Worst? Sean Connery in "The Name of the Rose", and the (brilliant) Viggo Mortensen as Aragorn, who definitely should have been played by a more of a Basil Rathbone character.

And of the stories you've written, who do you see playing the lead roles?

 

[Jackie.Hikaru]

Emma Watson as Hermione Granger was definitely a terrible miscast if I had my way. But then she grew on me. She's the perfect Hermione Granger.

When I wrote The Princess of Akaishi Castle, I pictured Jeong Ho-yeon in the lead role.

 

[Rustyoznail]

One of the worst? Tom Cruise as Jack Reacher. Cruise is not 6' 5" and built like a brick shit house.

 

[BobbyBrandt]

One of the worst? Tom Cruise as Jack Reacher. Cruise is not 6' 5" and built like a brick shit house.

This would be my choice as the worst casting as well. Ben Alfleck as Jack Ryan (Tom Clancy) is a close second.

 

[lovecraft68]

One of the worst? Tom Cruise as Jack Reacher. Cruise is not 6' 5" and built like a brick shit house.

The guy playing Reacher in the Amazon series really drove that point home.

 

[lovecraft68]

I have a serial killer novel where the female killer is schizophrenic. one personality acts like a child, the other a batshit crazy killer. Even though she's starting to look to old for the part, since I wrote it I keep seeing Sheri Moon Zombie in the role. She can go from giggly sweet to lunatic in the blink of an eye.

 

[stickygirl]

Jennifer Ehle was perfect as Elisabeth in the 1995 version of Pride and Prejudice. Keira Knightley was appalling in the same role but the whole film was shit.

Viggo Mortensen, Kate Blanchett, Hugo Weaving all nailed their roles in LOTR but the rest of the cast were superb. I wasn't a fan of Sean Astin in the role because his accent was too fake.

Juliette Binoche in Chocolat was exactly the person I'd imagined.

Characters who've been in my head when writing include Gwyneth Paltrow & Viggo, but sometimes my imagined character will swap around. Sometimes you just need a look or expression from an actor for inspiration. My other characters are taken from real life.

 

[BobbyBrandt]

I have been so turned off by Hollywood over the past few decades that I couldn't name more than a couple of popular actors or actresses right now. Where trying to identify someone to play the characters in my stories is concerned, I would gravitate towards actors that I remember from before the turn of the century, and most of them would now be too old for the part.

 

[nice90sguy]

I think if Joan Rivers were still alive she'd have made a perfect Queen Elizabeth in The Crown.

 

[lovecraft68]

I have been so turned off by Hollywood over the past few decades that I couldn't name more than a couple of popular actors or actresses right now. Where trying to identify someone to play the characters in my stories is concerned, I would gravitate towards actors that I remember from before the turn of the century, and most of them would now be too old for the part.

Other than horror-and even with that I watch more shudder and Netflix originals than anything Hollywood is spewing out-I'm with you. I'm not a movie/TV person in general, but its a declining industry and these days everything is a reboot, sequel or remake, there's nothing new to the point they're taking movies like Hocus Pocus and doing a part two decades later. Don't get me started on their fake "empowerment" with all the race and gender swaps of existing characters rather than making new characters and movies featuring them....here you go, female/LGBTQ/diverse person, here's another white man hand me down character, now run along and give us credit on social media for being woke.....ugh

 

[SimonDoom]

Good: Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon. I saw the movie a long time ago, before I ever read the book, and Bogart was so good he permanently fixed in my mind what a hard-boiled noir detective was like.

I can't think of too many cases because in most cases I read the book first. I agree with Stickygirl about Jennifer Ehle in Pride and Prejudice, and I thought Colin Firth was perfect too as Mr. Darcy. (I also agree with Stickygirl about the relative merits of the 1995 TV version (excellent) and the Knightly movie (not so excellent).

Ian McKellen as Gandalf in LOTR was almost exactly the way I imagined him when I read the books 25 years earlier. I thought the whole cast was good, although Elijah Wood was not at all the way I imagined Frodo and the actor who played Denethor overdid his role.

Daniel Day Lewis as Lincoln. He was amazing. I felt like I was watching the president. From everything I've read he absolutely nailed the high-pitched voice and Kentucky accent.

I saw Game of Thrones before I read the books. I thought it was generally well cast, although the accents were all over the map. It's hard to imagine Ned as anyone other than Sean Bean.

Bad: Sean Connery (an actor I almost always enjoy, especially as Bond) as an immortal Spanish swordsman in Highlander, and as the Lithuanian Captain Ramius in The Hunt for Red October, because he can't mask his strong Scottish accent in either role. He sounds ridiculous in both.

Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder in Dracula, in roles that require British accents and that even an American like me can tell are laughably bad attempts. Reeves is a great action star but not much of an actor.

There are countless examples of Americans doing bad British accents. I'm generally surprised at how well the Brits handle American accents.

 

[nice90sguy]

Slightly off-topic, but I love watching Bewitched (original ofc), and always wish that the Darrin/Samantha roles were played by Jim Carrey and Meg Ryan.

 

[lovecraft68]

Good: Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon. I saw the movie a long time ago, before I ever read the book, and Bogart was so good he permanently fixed in my mind what a hard-boiled noir detective was like.

I can't think of too many cases because in most cases I read the book first. I agree with Stickygirl about Jennifer Ehle in Pride and Prejudice, and I thought Colin Firth was perfect too as Mr. Darcy. (I also agree with Stickygirl about the relative merits of the 1995 TV version (excellent) and the Knightly movie (not so excellent).

Ian McKellen as Gandalf in LOTR was almost exactly the way I imagined him when I read the books 25 years earlier. I thought the whole cast was good, although Elijah Wood was not at all the way I imagined Frodo and the actor who played Denethor overdid his role.

Daniel Day Lewis as Lincoln. He was amazing. I felt like I was watching the president. From everything I've read he absolutely nailed the high-pitched voice and Kentucky accent.

I saw Game of Thrones before I read the books. I thought it was generally well cast, although the accents were all over the map. It's hard to imagine Ned as anyone other than Sean Bean.

Bad: Sean Connery (an actor I almost always enjoy, especially as Bond) as an immortal Spanish swordsman in Highlander, and as the Lithuanian Captain Ramius in The Hunt for Red October, because he can't mask his strong Scottish accent in either role. He sounds ridiculous in both.

Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder in Dracula, in roles that require British accents and that even an American like me can tell are laughably bad attempts. Reeves is a great action star but not much of an actor.

There are countless examples of Americans doing bad British accents. I'm generally surprised at how well the Brits handle American accents.

Connery was also a bad choice for League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

Reeves played Constantine and when I heard of the casting I was like, wow, this will be bad. John Constantine is a blonde haired British guy.....but yet Reeves nailed it, and probably because he didn't try to be British, just his own version.

As far as GOT as long as the women had tits to show off every thirty seconds nothing else mattered.

And hey, being he was going to die early on...who else to play Stark except Bean who has made a career out of dying, very dramatically in LOTR.

 

[Comshaw]

Nailed it:
Val Kilmer -- Doc Holliday (Tombstone)
Clint Eastwood -- Walt Kowalski Gran Torino)
Cathy Bates -- Annie Wilkes (Misery)
George Burns -- GOD (Oh God)
Robert Shaw -- Quint (Jaws)
Whoopie Goldberg -- Celie Johnson (The Color Purple)
Charlize Theron -- Eileen (Monster)

Screwed the pooch:
Tom Cruise -- Jack Reacher (Reacher)
Hallie Berry -- Patience Phillips (Cat Woman)
Steven Segal -- Any character he ever portrayed
Brian Bosworth --Joe Huff / John Stone (Stone Cold)


Comshaw

 

[lovecraft68]

Not so much about the actor, but the change in the character. Hooper in Jaws played by Dreyfuss was a fun character and a good guy.

In the book-which I read after seeing the movie, he was a total d-bag who fucked Brody's wife(I was like...Hooper, WTF?) he also dies in the end and I can't imagine too many readers caring, but it would have been upsetting if it happened to movie Hooper

 

[MateoParks]

One of the worst? Tom Cruise as Jack Reacher. Cruise is not 6' 5" and built like a brick shit house.

Controversial, but I liked Cruise. He didn't have the bulk but he had the character down perfect. Thad Castle in the new Amazon series came across as arrogant and unnecessarily snarky to me, which Reacher definitely isn't, and that broke my immersion more than Cruise's size. In the books, Reacher's constantly second guessing himself and calling himself and idiot, but when he's in his element, he's very confident in what he can do. Sometimes he plays up an arrogant angle if it gives him an advantage, but Thad didn't get that nuance right.

But I don't think Reacher works well on screen. It's a fish out of water story, first and foremost, and given his stoic persona, that'd be really hard to portray without his normal internal monologue. They haven't gotten it right, yet. It's always the super sleuth action hero, which doesn't differentiate it from anything else out there.

 

[SimonDoom]

Not so much about the actor, but the change in the character. Hooper in Jaws played by Dreyfuss was a fun character and a good guy.

In the book-which I read after seeing the movie, he was a total d-bag who fucked Brody's wife(I was like...Hooper, WTF?) he also dies in the end and I can't imagine too many readers caring, but it would have been upsetting if it happened to movie Hooper

I read the book before I saw the movie in this case (I'm a few years older than you, I think), and the movie was much better. All three of the main characters were better in the movie than in the book, but especially Hooper. I totally agree. The whole affair with Brody's wife seemed pointless and salacious and just made you want to see him be shark food. Whereas in the movie Hooper was appealing in a sarcastic way and the interaction between Hooper and Quint was great. Robert Shaw was amazing as Quint, as well -- much more interesting and deeper than the character in the book.

Next to The Godfather (which is by far number 1 in this respect), Jaws was the best example I can think of where the movie was better than the book.

 

[PennameWombat]

I’ll stay positive with my mentions. Some of the panned performances in films already mentioned I’ve not seen, or I’ve not read the books so have no basis for comment.

Malcolm McDowell as Alex, in “A Clockwork Orange.” Like Kubrick, I originally read the American edition of the novel that lacked the ‘redemptive’ final chapter and the movie fit my conceptions almost perfectly.

With Ian McKellen taken, so to speak, Sean Astin as Samwise Gamgee, in the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy.

Slim Pickens and George C. Scott in “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” And Peter Sellers. And… oh, hell. All of them. But especially that Pickens was never given the full script and Kubrick let him play the role ‘straight.’ And, in opposition, Scott was tricked into “practicing” the wild overacting we see and Kubrick kept those takes and discarded the ‘straight‘ ones. Wildly different in tone and with significant character changes (e.g., no Dr. Strangelove in the book) but plotwise quite true to the source novel (‘Red Alert’ aka ‘Two Hours to Doom’), so seems to qualify for this thread.

 

[ChloeTzang]

David Lynch's 1984 version of Dune with Kyle MacLachlan as Paul Atreides. I thought Kyle was horribly miscast - too old, and far too fat-faced and chubby. He looked like a wholesome all-american young man slung into a Sci-Fi movie and acting a part that didn't suit him at all. Sting as Feyd Rautha was brilliant tho. By far the best of the different actors that have played Feyd.

As for actors that nailed it, Donald Sutherland in pretty much every movie he's in. He's been in so many movies, but watch him in Bertolucci's "1900" and in "The Puppet Masters." I first saw in in "1900" and he was soooooo good. Just one little scene in another movie he was in....

 

[Duleigh]

Best casting decision: Every single part in Young Frankenstein. That movie is perfection.

Worst casting decision: Daniel Craig as James Bond. Good lord, every time I read the Spectre trilogy I could weep. James Bond was a spy, Daniel Craig is to spy craft as what Gordon Ramsay is to polite conversation. Craig plays a thug excellently, but Bond wasn't a thug, he was suave. The only worse casting choice could possibly be Jodie Whittaker as The Doctor. Good lord she's nauseating. Peter Capaldi had the role of the Doctor nailed and then Jodie happened.

 

[XerXesXu]

Worst casting decision: Daniel Craig as James Bond. Good lord, every time I read the Spectre trilogy I could weep. James Bond was a spy, Daniel Craig is to spy craft as what Gordon Ramsay is to polite conversation. Craig plays a thug excellently, but Bond wasn't a thug, he was suave.

Most of this thread is without my knowledge, but I watch movies enough to agree that Craig's portrayal of Bond was misdirected. He's a talented actor and could have done it any way the director wished, it was a misjudgment, in my view, by the director.

 

[grey228]

Connery was also a bad choice for League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

IIRC, it was his final film before retiring. Connery had refused X-men (parts went to McKellan and Stewart) and (I think) Watchmen as well. So he did League because it was a comic. I'm kinda glad the movie didn't cover the anal rape/death of the invisible man.

Which movie character nailed or screwed your image of t

Hayden Christensen in Jumper. Good novel series by Gould (I have all four) and the extra book with Griffin's story (based on the awful, awful movie).

 

[SouthernCrossfire]

I agree on several of the suggestions that have been made so far so I'll add one that hasn't been mentioned: Matthew McConaughey as Dirk Pitt in 2004's "Sahara." He did a nice job with the role but neither he nor the movie was like Clive Cussler's book (or the character like any of the other books in the series). All of the other characters seemed off, too, and the public seemed to agree, with the movie bombing at the box office and Clive Cussler suing, the production company suing, nobody winning anything substantial, and the chance of another movie (that nobody wanted with that crew) going down like the Titanic*.

*"Raise the Titanic" was a previous Clive Cussler/Dirk Pitt film starring Richard Jordan from 1980 It was equally miscast and, based on profit and loss percentages, it bombed even worse than Sahara.