Forgive me if I’ve asked this question (or something close to it) recently. I feel like maybe I have, but I also couldn’t find anything like it when I ran a search. I might be feeling this way because this idea has been nagging at me since forever and I’ve always wanted to find an excuse to mention it (and, again, I might have already!). It’s this:
There’s something about an actor portraying a character that has the same first name as them that bugs me. (Oddly, I cannot recall an actor ever playing a character with the same last name as them. I suppose it’s probably happened, but maybe it’s not as conspicuous.) Obviously(?), I am not talking about actors playing some version of their actual selves, like — for an extreme example — John Malkovich in Being John Malkovich. But in other instances, the thing that springs to mind when I try to figure out why this bothers me is that I end up with the sneaking suspicion that this means that the actor is unable to lose themselves enough in a role so that they respond to the character’s name rather than their own name.
I know this is completely unreasonable of me! Especially since when I do come across an actor playing a character with their same name, they have inevitably done very well portraying other characters with whom they do not share a name. What I’m thinking makes no sense at all, is completely absurd, I know… and yet, there it is, always in the back of my mind, a dark earworm that I can’t not hear.
So: What’s a notion you hold about pop culture (movies, TV, comics, whatev) that you know is unreasonable but can’t shake?
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I think your “same name” notion is pretty accurate when it comes to the sort of extremely inexperienced actors you sometimes see in ultra-low-budget films. It’s not clear if having the same character name helps them, in that their performances are usually terrible with the “same name” crutch.
My “unreasonable notion” is a bit of an odd and inconsistent one. This doesn’t always happen, but sometimes when I see a prominent actor above a certain age play a character who dies, I can’t help thinking the actor is actually dead, too! For example, I’m always mildly surprised to see William Devane still being alive and doing stuff, when he clearly died several years ago on 24. Michael McKean is another one, who (unlike Chuck McGill on Better Call Saul) is happily still with us.
I think perhaps the death of Nancy Marchand coinciding with Mrs. Soprano’s death messed with my brain.
Related notion: It makes me uncomfortable when a main character discovers that an older, healthy-seeming character has died, and no reason is given for the death. Like, “Meh, they were old, so they just died of oldness, right?”
Makes me wonder how it feels to play such a character.
On the character name front, I hate it when a story has two characters with similar names. “Sauron” and “Saruman” as two of your big bads? Come on, Tolkien!
The same-first-name thing bugs me too.
Thankfully, it also bugged Michelle Yeoh. They were going to make her character’s name Michelle in Everything Everywhere All at Once, and she refused to do the movie if they didn’t change it.
My unreasonable pet peeve is hiring actors in their twenties to play teenagers. I get why they do it, but it’s annoying, especially with male actors whose voices have changed past the point where the age they’re playing is remotely credible.
At least that’s better than hiring actors in their thirties!