Let’s forget for a moment, shall we, that Alan Rickman is doing a serious Ibsen play in Brooklyn. This scene from Harry Potter, when Neville Longbottom reinvents Snape in his grandmother’s clothing, is far too short.
Category: dreams
A Brit a Day [#306]
Gift #6:
Read with a child on the internet to learn more about the Christmas Truce of 1914.
[In the top photo, Dan Radcliffe wears a WW1 uniform for the film ‘My Boy Jack,’ but that is not meant to imply that Jack Kipling was involved in the Christmas truce.]
Gift #7:I’m taking Christmas Day off. Fervently dream of world peace, everyone!
A Brit a Day [#293]
I’ve decided that the character Adrian from ‘After the Rain’ [left, as played by Ian Cusick] is my new imaginary high school boyfriend that I never had. Actually, I shouldn’t say that. I had one great boyfriend in High School. His name was Richard, and he didn’t even go to my school–he went to the tony private school down the street–but some weeks we still saw each other almost every day. We lost touch when we all went away to college. I think by then we were mad at each other over something–I can’t remember what, though. Richard K., you know who you are–so where are you now??
A Brit a Day [#223]
Let’s have one last look at Brianna and Roger, they are so lovely. And I have one last bit of business in the casting department–Fergus, the feral young lad that Jamie takes on as a spy in the court of Louis XV. Fergus is a real piece of work, and his boyish energy [read that ‘trouble-making] is the catalyst for several big scenes. Since we’re just dreamin’ here anyway, I’m going to reach back in time to escort tiny Daniel Radcliffe from his role in ‘David Copperfield’ to the cast of ‘Outlander.’
A Brit a Day [#222]
I’m rather proud of this bit of amateur casting: Eddie Argos as Roger Wakefield and Rebecca Mader [formerly of LOST] as Claire’s daughter Brianna. Eddie-as-Roger is the inspiraton for the theme of my posts this week. I’ve been reading the Outlander series for some time now, and Roger, a professional historian much like Claire’s twentieth century husband Frank, is a pivotal character in the second book as well as the third which I’m reading right now. Roger was Eddie in my imagination from the beginning, and once you have a picture in your head of Roger, it follows that you start to wonder who Brianna would be….
The one character that I refuse to cast is the most important one, Claire. I have no idea who she is, beyond equating her with the book-jacket photos I have seen of Diana Gabaldon herself. I think the difficulty of casting Claire lies in the fact that all [at least] women readers of these books tend to feel like they are looking at the story through Claire’s eyes. The narrative is told in first and third person, and not always from Claire’s POV. Still, I think when we sister readers make that little private movie we inevitably do in our heads, we cast ourselves as Claire.
A Brit a Day [#221]
I want to start today’s post with a disclaimer. With the exception of Dan Radcliffe, I’ve shown every actor in character this week, a character that hopefully presages what they would be like in a film adaptation of ‘Outlander’. For example, I know that Alan Rickman is not Rasputin, and I know the difference between Christian Bale and Bruce Wayne. This, moreover, is a picture of Henry Ian Cusick playing Desmond Hume, in a universe where Henry Ian Cusick is not identical with Desmond Hume. Got that?
So…I give you Henry Ian Cusick as Jamie Fraser, road-weary and battle-scarred. After mastering the role of Desmond on LOST, Ian would totally get the time travel thing. He would get the essence of Jamie as a man who must do the honorable thing. And I for one would pay money to see him in a kilt.
Ian’s eyes are not blue, his hair is not red, and he’s not exceptionally tall. But I can just imagine that he would wear contacts, dye his hair, and stand on a box to make his fans’ dreams come true.
[One of my girlfriends brought this picture to my attention on Lost Media, and I thank her. Click on it and it gets even more gorgeous.]
A Brit a Day [#219]
Dan Radcliffe photographed by Annie Liebowitz. I’m casting him as Frank Randall, history professor and Claire’s husband in the 1940’s. I mean, there has to be a reason why she thinks about him so often, right?
A Brit a Day [#218]
OK, work with me here. I’m casting Christian Bale as Bonnie Prince Charles Edward Stuart from the second Outlander novel. I know this picture is anachronistic to the Uprising of 1745, but you know darn well that a would-be Scottish monarch exiled in France would have worn Armani if he could have. And nobody wears an Armani suit like Bruce Wayne.
And equating Batman with The Pretender is great historical deconstruction.
A Brit a Day [#192]
Henry Ian Cusick–a face so nice I thought you should see both sides of it.
Today is my mom’s 87th birthday. I’ve definitely inherited some of my tendencies from her. When she was just a blushing girl of, oh–maybe 80, she had a tiny crush on the handsome 30-ish guy who made photocopies for her at the copy shop. Her friend, another elderly lady, was appalled. “He’s probably married,” the friend said, as though she seriously thought my mom might act on it. That was ridiculous. My mom and I both know that you are allowed to have a life in your head that belongs to nobody else–it doesn’t even really belong to your earthly self, it’s separate from that. She said to her friend, “You know, I’m not dead yet.”
Happy birthday, Mom. I love you heaps, and I love your style.
A Brit a Day [#136]
Christian Bale has graciously stepped aside for the day to allow James Blunt to bring his ‘plus one’. I don’t know if the gentleman who is seated is his producer, an engineer, or a band mate…but isn’t that recording studio, with its natural light flowing through the big French windows, the one of your dreams? Hands in pockets, it seems like a moment of peaceful accomplishment for James Blunt.
