So, as a child of the 1980s, I am contractually obligated to complain about the Michael Bay-directed Turtles flicks, but I have to say that I am bothered by the presence of Steven “Green Arrow” Amell as Casey Jones. Maybe it’s the similarity in motifs between Mssrs. Jones & Queen, or maybe that Steven only has one acting mode, but his doing double duty is bothersome. I’m slightly less bothered by Zoe Saldana playing both Nyota Uhura and Gamora in the new ‘Star Trek’ and ‘Guardians Of The Galaxy’ franchises, if only because the makeup and appliances of Gamora differentiate the characters, and she provides more contrast as an actor, and Ryan Reynolds manages to be different kinds of smirky jerks as Deadpool and Green Lantern. Meanwhile, Marvel movies have repeatedly hired a blond man named Chris to play Captain America, Thor, Star-Lord, The Human Torch and Iron Man (Chris Downey Jr is my favorite) leading to today’s casting-couch query…
The MS-QOTD (pronounced, as always, “misquoted”) weirdly doesn’t mind Brandon Routh as The Atom after having revived the role of Christopher Reeve Superman, asking: Does it bother you when an actor does double duty as more than one similar character?
4 Comments
Like many answers of mine, it depends.
On one hand, I’m kinda used to seeing the same actor in multiple roles from franchises like Star Trek, where you have people like Jeffrey Combs playing almost 20 characters across multiple series in the same franchise (although about half of them are technically the same character via cloning), with many of them being quite similar save for the makeup he’s wearing.
On the other hand, you get “flavor of the month” actors playing a “same but different but same” role in another franchise just because they want a current big name attached even though they are completely wrong for that character, or maybe they are right for the character but it just doesn’t bring anything new to the table.
It just depends. Sometimes it works out great and I love it, sometimes it is just dreadful and I want it to go away.
No, thats how it used to be. 80’s action stars were in so many similar roles that people usually didn’t even bother to say their role names. It was just “Stallone” “Schwarzenegger” or “Eastwood” . Eastwood didn’t even have a real name for his western characters.
Not really, no, but it DID wig me out a bit when I found out that Iceman and Smallville’s JImmy Olsen were NOT the same actor. &@*#(n’ twins, go back to Winath!
I knew of the twins, but I wasn’t exactly sure which was which as both had parts in the series (At the time, I usually came in after the credits rolled and didn’t have easy internet access to look them up when I thought about it). Took me a while to figure out which one was playing Jimmy and which one was playing the power leeching guy from Season 1 & 3.