Comment on Why do people refer to characters in movies by their actor's names?
HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 1 day ago
It is actually a convention for movie reviews to use the actor name while TV reviews will use the character name. Why? A lot of it is thought that movie goers aren’t going to be as familiar with a character name as they would be with the actor in that role.
AngryRedHerring@lemmy.world 1 day ago
That’s interesting, I’ve never heard that before. Makes sense. Where did you pick that up?
HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 1 day ago
I’ve seen some reviewers talk about it and I did a web search to confirm.
AngryRedHerring@lemmy.world 23 hours ago
I am actually kind of embarrassed because I have worked in entertainment all my life and I have only now copped to this. But it makes perfect sense, because
Movie stars have always been “bigger” than TV stars (and TV is always been a bit of a step down from film in actors’ eyes). Movie names have always been more recognizable, generally, than TV names.
Movie stars play a different character in almost every two-hour “episode”, while TV stars play the same character every week, sometimes for years on end. We had much more time to became familiar with the characters, and knew (mostly) that we’d be seeing them again next week.
In the old TV guide, when describing movies they always had to say “Bruce Willis plays so and so in…”; they had to introduce you to the character with every movie listing. But with TV, say MASH, they would always say “This week, Hawkeye…” and everybody was in sync right away, from exposure and experience. Alan Alda was Alan Alda in California Suite, and in interviews, politics etc., but when it came to talking about TV, he was always Hawkeye. We never said “Alan Alda did X this week.”
This is like the end of The Sixth Sense. I’m looking back now and seeing it everywhere.
FreshParsnip@lemmy.ca 7 hours ago
The exception seems to be movies that are part of big franchises. I’ve never heard anyone refer to Harry Potter as “Dan Ratcliffe”. But then when a franchise has a lot of remakes and reboots, it reverts back again. People call Batman actors and James Bond actors by their real names to distinguish which version of Batman or James Bond they mean