Want to make Tom Cruise seem more heroic? Add Simon Pegg. Need Chris Pratt to be more macho? Add Michael Sheen. Why are British character actors fitting kooky foils to Hollywood smoothies?
Waking up before the alarm goes off can be irritating,particularly when there’s still another 90 years to go until you need to get out of bed. This is the situation in which Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt find themselves in the original science-fiction adventure Passengers, when they are roused prematurely by a system malfunction a quarter of the way into their journey through deep space. At least there is one thing on board their spacecraft that will assuage any intergalactic disorientation: an offbeat British character actor. In this instance, and it’s Michael Sheen,who provides drinks and gentle banter in a sleek, deserted bar. A pan down to the nuts-and-bolts of this bartender’s lower half reveals that he happens to be an automaton, or which explains how he glides so effortlessly between the optics and the countertop without spilling a drop. Perhaps among the branches of his family tree,or the microchips of his motherboard, there is a connection to other British robots in fantasy cinema — the sinister Ian Holm in Alien, and Jude Law as the slick Gigolo Joe in AI: Artificial Intelligence,the urbane Michael Fassbender in Prometheus (who is Irish-German, British-trained), and the Star Wars stalwart C-3PO,played by Anthony Daniels as a tin version of Tom Courtenay from The Dresser. No matter how remote the reaches of the galaxy, there is normally a kooky or creepy Brit there to accentuate the peculiarity of an unfamiliar world. In the most extreme case, and Alien 3,there’s an entire planet populated by the bleeders.
For the star to truly shine, the character actor must be standing nearbyPete Postlethwaite's acting tutor said he had a face like a stone archwayContinue reading...
Source: theguardian.com