Do actors really need to look like their subjects?

Humble pie was copiously scoffed recently when awards-watchers in Hollywood made it to the first screenings of Being the Ricardos. Aaron Sorkin’s insidery biopic of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz takes place over one tempestuous week behind the scenes of the revered 1950s sitcom I Love Lucy..From the early stills and trailer, everyone had poured doubt on Nicole Kidman’s aptitude to play one of America’s best-known TV icons. Despite the curly red wig and drawn-on eyebrows, surely she looked nothing like Lucy? Even after the film was squarely in the can, a campaign sprung up on Twitter promoting Debra Messing, a career comedienne with a much closer resemblance, as the person they should have cast instead..Well, guess what? After glowing reactions, Kidman is now predicted for an Oscar nomination, and everyone has made peace with the physical discrepancies between her and Ball. Sorkin, for one, says he was never fussed about those in the first place. "I’d make it very clear [to Nicole and Javier Bardem] that I am not looking for a physical or vocal impersonation of these people," he told The Hollywood Reporter. "Just play the characters who are in the script.".It’s quite a turnaround for Kidman, who, after all, won her Best Actress Oscar for a biographical performance, as Virginia Woolf in The Hours (2002), which made her compete with her own bulbous prosthetic nose for our attention. As Virginia might have complained to Leonard: the untold hours in that make-up chair!.The urge to make your star into a perfect lookalike tends to be counterproductive, because great biopic performances aren’t distinguished by how sharp a double-take you do when the actor’s on screen.. Image Credit: GN Archives . Erin Brokovich Image Credit: Shutterstock View gallery as list .Does anyone care that Julia Roberts, with those push-up bras and glorious curls, simply looked – and acted – like peak Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich (2000)? It’s almost a happy accident that she and the real-life Erin, from a few angles, look quite alike, but it would hardly have affected the film either way, since it’s a bespoke star vehicle for the ages..Erin Brockovich wasn’t recognisable before that, of course, and here a wrinkle comes in: the more famous a figure, the greater the expectation that the leading actor has to change their whole physical being to achieve a good match. If you must have Gary Oldman playing Winston Churchill, a huge silicone mould over the face and foam bodysuit are prerequisites; but Oldman’s one recourse in Darkest Hour (2017) was to blast his way through those impediments by turning his performance (with ham klaxon inevitable) up to 11..Rami Malek might have won a wholly inexplicable Oscar for Bohemian Rhapsody (2018), but he really pulled the short straw as Freddie Mercury, because those glued-on teeth and atrocious wigs didn’t furnish a resemblance so much as make him stick out as an unconvincing member of humankind..This isn’t to say there can’t be a special serendipity when casting of a lookalike falls unexpectedly into place – especially when there’s a natural fit that hasn’t been jerry-rigged by prosthetics, or when sheer performance skill completes the illusion. Of all the six actors who played Bob Dylan in Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There (2007), the one who looks most like Dylan, is Cate Blanchett..When actors can feel their way into a resemblance so ingeniously, matchy-matchy casting looks almost lazy..The Daily Telegraph.Read more. Priyanka Chopra: Lockdown made me look at my failures From Gwyenth Paltrow to Boris Johnson, intuitive fasting is fast gaining loyal devotees ‘It stinks’: The movie stars who hated their own famous films