TVTropes Now available in the app store!
Open
Tropes Media Reviews Popular Indexes Forums Videos Ask The Tropers Trope Finder Media Finder Trope Launch Pad Tech Wishlist Browse Tools
Cut List Image Fixer New Edits New Articles Edit Reasons Launches Images List Crowner Activity Un-typed Pages Recent Page Type Changes Changelog
Tips
Creating New Redirects Cross Wicking Tips for Editing Text Formatting Rules Glossary Edit Reasons Handling Spoilers Word Cruft Administrivia FAQ
Tropes HQ
About Us Contact Us DMCA Notice Privacy Policy Report Bug Terms Of Service
Go Ad-Free Changelog
  • Show Spoilers
  • Night Vision
  • Sticky Header
  • Highlight Links

Follow TV Tropes

Comic-Book Fantasy Casting
16 Following

Go To

Comic-Book Fantasy Casting (trope)
A rare case in which the real-world subject used as a template for the character eventually became actual Comic-Book Movie Casting.

Hank Pym: Who do you think they could get to play you [in a movie], Nick?
Nick Fury: Why, Mr. Samuel L. Jackson, of course. That's not even open to debate, Dr. Pym.
— The Ultimates

Sometimes in comics or animated shows, a character is made to look like a particular actor or other celebrity whom the artist imagines playing the character. This might be out of admiration for the actor, because the character fits with the actor's well-known roles, or in the hope that the actor would be flattered and try to get the comic adapted as a movie. Or it might be unconscious on the author/artist's part.

Fantasy casting can also occur in non-visual media such as (non-illustrated) novels but can be harder to spot unless Word of God acknowledges it, or the character is closely based on a particular role the actor is associated with.

If the resemblance is outright stated in the text, it's Textual Celebrity Resemblance. For when the character is a direct impression or parody of a celebrity's public persona, see No Celebrities Were Harmed. For when an animated character is designed to resemble the real-world voice actor, see Ink-Suit Actor. Compare Not Quite Starring, when an actor appears in a form of media, but they don't play themselves. See also Hypothetical Casting, for where creators do this as Word of God without making it explicit in canon.

Not the same thing as when a comic book or animation is spun-off from an earlier live-action film or TV show and the characters inevitably are drawn to look like the live-action actors, which would be "Reality Casting". However, sometimes there are borderline cases where a comic or animation is adapted into a live-action medium and artists on the original work then redesign a character to look like the actor in the adaptation.

Examples:

    open/close all folders 

    Anime & Manga 

    Arts 

    Comic Strips 
  • Apartment 3-G: The main characters were all based on actresses who were popular when the strip came out: Margo is Joan Collins, Tommie is Lucille Ball, and Lu Ann is Tuesday Weld. It's a lot more obvious◊ in the early strips.
  • In the Doctor Who Magazine comic strips:
    • In "A Change of Mind", the villainous Mad Scientist Professor Hardin is both physically based on, and named after, Jerry Hardin, best known as Deep Throat in The X-Files.
    • Long-running Eighth Doctor companion Izzy S was based, according to Word of God, initially on the singer Louise Wener and later on the actress Luisa Bradshaw-White.
    • The Eighth Doctor strips also featured a fake Ninth Doctor, in reality, the Time Lord agent Shayde in disguise, who was visually based on the Big Name Fan, spin-off actor-director, and now official Dalek voice artist Nicholas Briggs.
    • Leighton Woodrow, a MI6 recurring character from that era of the comics, was closely based on Leo McKern, specifically, as he appeared when playing Number Two in The Prisoner (1967).
    • Frobisher's humanoid form in his Eighth Doctor reappearance is based on James Gandolfini.
    • In the Twelfth Doctor strips, Jess Collins was based on actress MéLissa Azombo, a big Doctor Who fan who jumped at the chance to be in the comic, even doing a photoshoot as reference for artist David A. Roach.
    • Tech-bro quadrillionaire Rudy Zoom, a recurring character in the Twelfth Doctor strips, is closely based on Lenny Henry (who'd subsequently get a role in "Spyfall" as wealthy tech-bro Daniel Barton, though he's a villain where Rudy's more or less on the Doctor's side).
    • The younger version of the War Doctor seen in The Clockwise War and Ambush is obviously based on a young John Hurt-specifically the picture used for his reflection in "The Night of the Doctor".
  • Doonesbury: Many characters started out as caricatures of real-life figures, although they tend to evolve away from the initial resemblance over time, and often outlast the original figure's fame. The most prominent such character in the strip is Uncle Duke, based on Hunter S. Thompson.
  • Jump Start: Joe's partner, Crunchy, was clearly based on Ed Asner. He even has the personality of the types of characters Asner has a tendency to play, having a gruff exterior with a Hidden Heart of Gold.

    Fan Works 
  • Abraxas: The Kaiju/Titans are able to communicate with each other and with the transformed Vivienne Graham and the author has described what the voices of Ichi, Ni and Godzilla sound like here. She's also toyed with potential voice claims for Thor, Mothra, and Rodan, and has stated Monster X's (San and Vivienne) voice in its first form sounds like the Gravemind's in Halo.
  • A Thing of Vikings: The author, after being asked, made a Tumblr post with face claims for some of the fic's OC’s.
  • Back in the day, Lance Parkin and Mark Clapham wrote a series of Doctor Who fanfics featuring the 42nd Doctor (played, of course, by Ian Richardson) and his wife Iphegenia (played by Caitlin Moran).
  • Earth-27: Several characters resemble some of their more famous appearances.
  • In LIBERI FATALIS: The Therianthrope Chronicles, Original Generation character Akane Araki is more or less based physically in the Haitian-Japanese tennis player Naomi Osaka, through some parts of her personality were taken from Samuel L. Jackson. Similarly, her friend Kaguya Hoshino is partly inspired on Japanese movie actress Chiaki Kuriyama, with some takes from Arisu Tachibana from THE iDOLM@STER: Cinderella Girls.
  • Aylen: The author confirmed on her Tumblr blog that the original character Dr. Gabriel Davies is physically based on Christopher Lee, specifically when he was in his mid-20's during his earliest film roles such as Penny and the Pownall Case. This is an interesting example because the character Alexander Saxton, who was played by a middle-aged Lee, is also in this fic and the one it spun off from, The bird which always returns. Alexander and Gabriel are noted in-universe to share some personality traits such as their shyness, social anxiety, and devotion to their partners, Paul and Charles, respectively.
  • Screaming Until Dawn:
    • Following the abduction of the comatose Jill Roberts, the sole surviving witness was a Doctor at the hospital named Julian Carters, who is described as looking and sounding like Keith David. It was apparently to the point his co-workers joked about him actually being Keith David doing a method acting bit for a role.
    • Deputy Fred Cravens, the responding officer who finds and rescues the revived Jill is described as looking like he could be a body double for Chris Evans or Ryan Gosling.
    • An In-Universe example occurs regarding Bob Washington's movie, Wittebane. According to the description, the witch Evelyn was played by Winona Ryder.

    Films — Animation 

    Films — Live-Action 

    Literature 
  • Discworld:
    • Paul Kidby's illustrations of Sam Vimes in cover designs and other art deliberately depict him as Clint Eastwood. By contrast, Melvyn Grant, the artist of Where's My Cow?, drew Vimes like Pete Postlethwaite, who was said to be Terry Pratchett's own fantasy casting for the role. Kidby has since tried to develop his Vimes into a sort of cross between Eastwood and Postlethwaite.
    • Similarly, Kidby has based his drawings of Carrot Ironfoundersson on a young Liam Neeson.
    • His later interpretation of Miss Level is based on Indira Varma, who reads the Witches audiobooks.
  • Cornelia Funke based Mo in Inkheart on Brendan Fraser, who went on to play the character in the film version. (And in her less-famous novel The Thief Lord, she based Viktor on Bob Hoskins. It was also made into a film, but not with Bob Hoskins in.)
  • Harry Dresden is generally described (and in illustrations and the comics, drawn) in fashions that evoke a young Clint Eastwood, which carries over into the art. Tall, lean, dark-haired, stubbly, sharp features... yep, that's Clint.
  • Doctor Who Expanded Universe examples:
  • Word of God from Marissa Meyer is that Linh Cinder from The Lunar Chronicles was modeled after Mew Azama, the actress who played Sailor Jupiter in Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon.
  • Barbara Hambly:
  • Supposedly, J. K. Rowling based Hagrid on Robbie Coltrane when she was writing the first Harry Potter book. Either way, when the movies rolled around, she insisted that Robbie Coltrane was the only choice for the part of Hagrid and, fortunately for her, they got himnote . JK has also said that she imagined Professor McGonagall as being Maggie Smith. This also worked out for her. One that didn't however, was her vision of Tim Roth as Snape (Roth later confirmed he was offered the part, but was unable to appear in the first film due to his commitment to Planet of the Apes (2001)), although it's clear that Alan Rickman did start to creep into her image of him in later books.
  • Tamora Pierce often "casts" characters in her head in both her Tortall Universe and Circle of Magic books — sometimes the actor themselves or a role they've played. Rosethorn, for example, is based on Kira Nerys. (Yes, she's a Trekkie.) Rosto the Piper is played by James Marsters, which is pretty clear when you read Beka's description and then look at a picture of, say, Spike.
  • Played with in Gaunt's Ghosts. In the books, Gaunt is described as having blonde hair and it's generally agreed he was modeled after Sean Bean's performance in Sharpe. The funny thing is that the cover art also looks like Sharpe, only this time as he's described in the books.
  • Dr. Gideon Fell is described as being heavily corpulent, leaning on duel canes and bearing a thick moustache, whilst clad in a cape and with a shovel hat often clamped on his head. Fell's creator John Dickson Carr blatantly and openly based him on G. K. Chesterton.
  • Christopher Fowler's novel Hell Train is conceived as the novelisation of a fictional "lost" Hammer Horror film, with a framing narrative around the planning of the film. This includes an in-canon casting chapter where it's discussed which of the Hammer regulars and other well-known English character actors would play the major characters.
  • Happens in-universe in Nora Roberts' Tribute. After meeting Former Child Star Cilla McGowan, graphic novelist Ford Sawyer is inspired to create a new superheroine and bases her appearance off of Cilla's.
  • A.J. Butcher, the author of Spy High, said that he envisioned Lori as the tennis player Anna Kournikova, and would want her to be played by Kournikova in any screen adaptation (although Kournikova isn't an actress.)
  • William Goldman says he wrote Fezzik in The Princess Bride with André the Giant in mind. They got him for the movie, even though he didn't speak English!
  • Rex Mundi, the co-hero of Robert Rankin's Armageddon trilogy, is repeatedly described as looking like a young Harrison Ford. The third book in the trilogy finishes with "credits" (including actors who at the time of publication were obviously far too old for the characters (or, in the case of Orson Welles, too dead)). It also has a bunch of minor characters arguing over which film star they resemble as they fight to get more page space. Note that Rex's co-hero is a time-travelling Elvis Presley.
  • Writer Ian Fleming based the James Bond's original appearance on that of singer/actor Hoagy Carmichael. In later books, however, Fleming made Bond more closely resemble actor Sean Connery (including making the character part Scottish). Fleming's ideal choice was Cary Grant.
  • Recurring Star Wars character Kell Tainer resembles Jason Segel in illustrations. Both of them are very tall, so it's possibly intentional.
  • Neil Gaiman says that Shadow from American Gods is supposed to look like Dwayne Johnson.
  • An odd partial example - The Pirates books make a point out of describing the Captain in the introduction to every book as "all teeth and curls" and with "a pleasant, open face", both notorious clichés used to describe Tom Baker and Peter Davison's Doctors in Doctor Who ("teeth and curls" coming from a notorious Take That! line by Jon Pertwee's Doctor in "The Five Doctors", and "pleasant open face" from Terrance Dicks' Target novelisations). However, when the author was asked about whether he imagined the Captain being 'played' by those actors in an interview, he admitted that he didn't imagine him as anyone specific at all. The version of him that appears in The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists looks slightly like a mixture of Tom Baker and Peter Davison, but in the art style it's hard to tell, and his voice performance (by Hugh Grant) and animation is nothing like how either of them would have played the role.
  • Word of God is that in Star Trek: Vanguard, Admiral Nogura is "played" by Mako and Jon Cooper is James Naughton.
  • The depiction of Frost in the last book's cover of the Magic University series has a staggering resemblance to Keira Knightley.
  • The children's book Out of the Dust features a non-celebrity example. On the cover, there is a historical photograph of a girl named Lucille Burroughs. Word of God is that Billie Jo looks like her.
  • In the illustrations for the short story "Peaceniks" in The Essential Book of K9, the character Starjakk is modelled, with permission, on the actor Vitas Varnas.
  • Winston Groom imagined Forrest Gump to look like John Goodman.
  • A Memoir by Lady Trent indulges in this for the illustrations; for example, neither Lady Trent herself nor her best friend Tom Wilker are ever given much physical description in the text, but are drawn to resemble Maggie Smith and Domhnall Gleeson respectively.
  • In the illustrations for his Whitby Witches books, Robin Jarvis used the actress Margaret Rutherford as a model for Alice Boston. He has said that if she were still alive, he would have wanted her to play the character in a film adaptation.
  • Magpie Murders has an unusual Meta Fiction example that borders on in-universe Hypothetical Casting. The fictional in-universe Poirot-inspired Holocaust survivor detective Atticus Pünd is supposed to look like Ben Kingsley playing Itzhak Stern in Schindler's List and his creator Alan Conway nods at this by describing Pünd as looking more like an accountant than a detective. Conway was furious when the producers of a potential Pünd tv adaptation were unable to secure Kingsley.

    Podcasts 
  • Every film or tv show pitch on Are You Afraid of the Dark Universe? has it's cast handpicked by it's writer. The only major exceptions are the various characters already introduced inThe Mummy (2017), Javier Bardem as Frankenstein’s Monster (because Universal had already picked him, though he never filmed anything), and the characters already introduced in The Mummy Trilogy.
  • Cool Kids Table:
  • Chrissy Nada in All I Want for Christmas is Lori Laughlin, specifically her as Aunt Becky from Full House. And her husband Mike is played by John Stamos.
    • All the player characters in their Firefly game are played by actual actors. Mickey Spacelust is Russell Brand; Kimmy Jin is played by Taiwanese actress Shu Qi; Roc Me Amadeus is played by Noel Fielding; and Caleb is played by Sean Maher. Somehow.
    • Sid's parents in Sequinox are played by Jason Mantzoukas and Stephanie Beatriz.
  • Every episode of Ideal Remake features host Sam Gasch and his guest each bringing a list of their own actors to cast in each role for the remake they're suggesting, as well as their own picks for writer and director. The two (or more if there are multiple guests) will debate which choice fits the role as envisioned best, and the final hypothetical cast of the episode's remake is usually a mix of each list. This can also lead to odd situations where some choices are drastically different from each other in terms of age or gender because each person's ideas for what the remake should look like went in very different directions.
  • Hardcore, the resident scientist of Shuffle Quest, is played by Glenn Close. When asked what Hardcore wears, the showrunners said that she wears whatever Glenn Close wears.

    Puppet Shows 

    Tabletop Games 
  • In the early 1990s, BattleTech fans floated the older Lauren Bacall as ideal to play Clan War-era Natasha Kerensky.
  • The Brancalonia setting — being a pastiche of, and homage to, Italian comedies and fantasy films — has the "demi-giant" Morgant race, inspired by Bud Spencer and his frequent screen persona of an uncouth but good-hearted Boisterous Bruiser. While Morgants as a whole are as varied as humans, just bigger and wider, the archetypal Morgant used in the sourcebook illustrations is always a caricature of Bud.
  • One category for rolling up characters for the obscure game M-Force invoked this. It was "who would play your character in the movie?"
  • A few characters from Warhammer 40,000 are based on famous movie characters and are thus designed to resemble the actors who played them (though how much the models and/or official art reflect this is pretty hit or miss). Fabius Bile is pretty blatantly modeled on Richard O'Brien as Riff Raff, Sly Marbo is Sylvester Stallone's Rambo,note  etc., though sometimes there's no particular rationale for a character's resemblance to a particular celebrity. There's one cover painting for one of the Horus Heresy books where Horus bears an uncanny resemblance to James Gandolfini of all people.
    • Roboute Guilliman bears quite a resemblance to Mark Strong in some of his artwork. Ferrus Manus looks a bit like Jon Bernthal, especially his appearance as The Punisher. Eldrad Ulthran in official art where he is helmetless looks a lot like Hugo Weaving's Elrond.
  • Warhammer, the Fantasy game, also gets in on this. For instance Orion, the King in the Woods and ruler of Athel Loren, looks quite a bit like Mel Gibson in some of his art and in his Total War: Warhammer appearance and, at least early on, the vampire lord Vlad von Carstein was stringly based on Christopher Lee as Dracula.
  • At COTG Live Event, several wrestlers dressed as characters from the Champions Of The Galaxy card game. These characters then got special cards made to resemble the wrestlers portraying them, Thantos even getting altered abilities to make him even more like Chuck Taylor.
  • Iconic character Johnny Silverhand of Cyberpunk 2020 was consciously modeled after David Bowie. Unfortunately, since Bowie had died by the time for the video game adaptation, he's instead played by Keanu Reeves in Cyberpunk 2077.

    Video Games 

    Web Comics 

    Web Original 
  • In the Whateley Universe, Gunnery Sgt. Oscar Bardue (ret.) plays Nick Fury — in front of the in-universe majority shareholder of Marvel — thus giving readers their first real impression of who and what Bardue looks like.
  • Conversational Troping by El Sandifer in TARDIS Eruditorum when discussing the Doctor Who Missing Adventures novel The Dark Path as though it was actually published in 1968, just to show why this doesn't work. She notes that the evil Member of the Doctor's Race (don't mention the Time Lords!) who appears in the book is drawn on the cover to look like character actor Roger Delgado, suggesting McIntee had some casting ideas in mind when writing it.

    Western Animation 

Previous

Index

Next

  • Show Spoilers
  • Night Vision
  • Sticky Header
  • Wide Load

Important Links

Ask The Tropers Trope Finder Media Finder Trope Launch Pad Tech Wishlist Browse Go Ad Free!
Crucial Browsing
Resources
Top