As well as playing Bliar (sic) 3 times (as Sci pointed out), he's also played football manager Brian Clough in The Damned United and David Frost in Frost/ Nixon (both were written by Peter Morgan, who wrote the Bliar movies). He's also played Kenneth Williams of Carry On movie fame, or infamy (infamy, they've all got it in for me... Sorry). When you consider how effective he was at playing all 4 characters and when you consider what a disparate bunch they are/ were, it gives you an idea of his range.
^ Sheen's range is absolutely amazing, I agree, handling both classic Hollywood drama and genre stuff with ease. He was a lot of fun in that Tron sequel, too.
To do a bit of backtracking: I've only ever read a few books featuring Elias Vaughn. (The Typhon Pact books, Cast No Shadow, and the Lost Era ones). Is Sean Connery really the right choice to play that part? Looks-wise, maybe. But is it ever specified what kind of accent he has (if any)?
^ Connery has that sort of presence too, I suppose, though he would never have been my preferred choice. Connery is, well, Connery, I think he brings too much baggage to a role (well, he did before his retirement).
Well, was Connery the right choice, accent-wise, to play a Russian submarine captain, or a Spanish immortal, or the father of Indiana Jones, or various English characters like Robin Hood, King Richard I, and Allan Quatermain?
I don't know, I've never really felt that Connery really matched my concept of Vaughn. I like Bruce Boxleitner for him.
You know, Boxleitner never struck me as a good choice for Vaughn before, but after hearing in TRON: Uprising how rich and stentorian his voice has gotten with age, I'm starting to see how it could work.
I came to like Boxleitner a lot from his work on B5. But personally I've always seen and heard Burt Reynold's as Vaughn.
More to the point, was Patrick Stewart the right choice to play a Frenchman? Was the Montreal native William Shatner the right choice to play a starship captain from Iowa? I'd say that the both establish that accents in the future don't always pin down to countries that we, in the present, understand that they come from. To contrast, if Berengaria was a colony planet (and Vaughn wasn't born long enough after the colonys establishment for a colonial accent to necessarily develop) then it's perfectly possible that Vaughn's parents (and extended family) came from Scotland and he inherited their accent, despite classifying himself as Berengarian fr example.
Right. In the novels, I've described Jasminder Choudhury as having a "Denevan accent." In my mind I hear her as having a South Asian accent, but what's actually there in the text could mean anything, and implies an accent not quite like anything from Earth. And as for Earth natives like Picard, the multicultural, integrated nature of 24th-century Earth society means there's no reason to assume a simple correspondence of accent to nation of origin. Heck, in high school I knew a girl who was born and raised in New England -- maybe New Hampshire, I don't quite remember -- but had a lovely, posh English accent because she was raised by an English nanny. Such thing can happen in the melting pot that is America, and 24th-century Federation-capital Earth is surely even more of a melting pot (even though it generally seems to be overwhelmingly Euro-American onscreen).
I can't see it either. Sure, there's a physical resemblance in those photos, but personality-wise, I don't see it. My image of Burt Reynolds was formed in the '70s.
I kind of had my image broken by lack of presence and then reset by his reappearance starting in the mid to late 90's. If you have not seen either Boogie Nights or Mystery Alaska I'd recommend giving them a look. They both informed my casting of Reynold's as Vaughn especially the latter movie.