Typecasting

[bloodyrosemccoy]

Jenkins's Ear Day
National Cherish an Antique Day
National Former Prisoner of War Recognition Day
Winston Churchill Day
National Day (Iraq)

 

I don’t think I’m the only person who does this: when I write a story, I have a tendency to “cast” the characters—I pick actors, other characters I like, people I actually know, what-have-you to play the characters in my stories.* Sure it’s fun, but it also serves a purpose for me: it helps keep all my characters from turning into two people.

 

And the fun thing about casting for stuff like this is that you can make some seriously weird choices, which would never be possible in non-speculative fiction.

 

Well, a few days ago I realized how very odd my casting choices have become when I realized who was playing one of those damn throwaway characters who stuck around demanding her own story.  Dweijidŕ is an arhode (fuzzy, bipedal, four-armed, predatorial as all hell), a former cop who became a soldier and then later wound up at loose ends doing mercenary work. She likes reading old epics, shows a dismissive genius with languages, and could tear even other female arhodes apart if she felt like it, and she often does feel like it, but she also has a distaste for murder, if not for property damage.

 

And she is played in my head, flawlessly … by Ron Perlman.

 

God, I love what I do.

 

*Granted, given the stories I write, a lot of these are in voice or even essence only. I tend to populate my worlds with the things from Jim Henson’s workshop, so that the workshop itself would most likely be hired to do a third of my characters, and only a third would be diverse actors. That last third, of course, would consist entirely of Doug Jones swathed in prosthetics and standing in front of a greenscreen.

Comments

[nobleplatypus]

Doug Jones rocks! I saw him at the "Pan's Labyrinth" premier in Uptown and he was hilarious. So tall! So gangly! So impossibly in perfect control of his movements!

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

I have been in awe of Doug Jones for a while, and here's why: I saw a preview for Pan's Labyrinth that had El Hombre Palido moving his eyeball hands around, and I sat bolt upright and said, "My god, THAT'S THE SAME ACTOR WHO PLAYED ABE IN HELLBOY!"

"How the hell do you figure that?" said my friend. "You can't see his face in either one!"

"His hands," I explained, trying to explain with movements of my Mickey-Mouse fingers. "DId you see the way he moves them? It's DEFINITELY the same guy."*

I had to look him up just for that. If I can recognize you when you're covered in makeup BY THE WAY YOUR HANDS MOVE, you deserve some kind of laudation.


*I can even tell when they're using one of the mechanical pinky-bending hands instead of Jones's in Hellboy.