Comment on Why do people refer to characters in movies by their actor's names?

• HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  I’ve seen some reviewers talk about it and I did a web search to confirm.

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  • AngryRedHerring@lemmy.world ⁨22⁩ ⁨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

    1. 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.

    2. 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.

    3. 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.

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    • FreshParsnip@lemmy.ca ⁨6⁩ ⁨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

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      • AngryRedHerring@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        And those franchises are made up of “episodes”, like TV, where we become more familiar with the character with each exposure.

        I wonder if the identity shifts from the actor to the character with the first sequel.

        You mention Harry Potter-- and I’m thinking of another parallel, Star Wars-- in each, the principals were relative unknowns. So there were no huge personalities to supercede the characters at the outset. So yes, you didn’t hear people referring to “Daniel Radcliffe” until he started doing other movies (is my guess when it happened). Han Solo was just Han Solo. I don’t remember him becoming “HARRISON FORD” until after Raiders of the Lost Ark (and even then Indiana Jones is a tough character to grow beyond, though he did it).

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