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Ryan Reynolds is Connor Macleod of Clan Macleod... WTF?

Frontier said:
Admiral James Kirk said:
I like Ryan Reynolds but WTF? Are there no European actors left in Europe? Are there no French or Welsh Scottsmen available?
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Nope, none left. They're all to busy stealing American roles like Batman and Superman and Spiderman. About time we returned the favor! :p :lol:

(PS: I love Bale as Batman and am hopeful for Cavill as Supes. Just pointing out the hypocrisy in decrying a non-European being cast in a European role. IE, what does is matter where someone is from if they're a good actor?)
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What does Reynolds and good acting have to do with each other?

He was one of the big reasons Green Lantern was teh sux.
 
I think in this case it does matter where an actor is from. There will necessarily have to be flashbacks back into the 1400s (Connor) and 1600s (Duncan). You can't do that with American actors - their accents are plain wrong. For the original ancient times feeling you need a British accent to give it credibility.

Casting a new Connor and Duncan is really tough, though.
How about Ross McCall for Connor?
Angus Macfayden might make a nice Duncan. However, Adrian Paul still looks quite young ( https://p.twimg.com/AxznWGcCAAAKar1.jpg ), so that there's imo no reason not to cast him again.
 
Rhubarbodendron said:
I think in this case it does matter where an actor is from. There will necessarily have to be flashbacks back into the 1400s (Connor) and 1600s (Duncan). You can't do that with American actors - their accents are plain wrong. For the original ancient times feeling you need a British accent to give it credibility.
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Didn't stop them from hiring Lambert.
 
Competent actors can imitate whatever accent is required of them. The casting departments job is to keep auditioning actors till they find some who can.

Of course such considerations are often overruled by other factors much as the box office value of a high profile actors name.
 
Temis the Vorta said:
Competent actors can imitate whatever accent is required of them.
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That's quite untrue. Tommy Lee Jones, Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman and others are all competent actors but have put up terrible Irish accents onscreen, while others like Kevin Costner or Robert Redford were so bad at doing English accents that it was decided to just let them perform the roles (in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and Out of Africa respectively) in their own accents. Liam Neeson and Sean Connery pretty much do their own accent in every role they're in.

Some actors and actresses are lucky enough to have an ear for accents and can turn out a note-perfect one every time (Streep and Day-Lewis are the obvious ones) but there is no correlation between competency in acting and an ability to adapt an accent.
 
That's only too true! Some American actors trying to speak German or to mimic a German accent make my toenails curl! Take Alan Cumming who played Kurt Wagner (aka Nightcrawler) in X2: He is an excellent actor and I enjoyed his performance in that movie tremendousely. - As long as he didn't say anything.
He had only 2 sentences in German but he has such a distinct British accent there that they are hardly recognizable to a native speaker of German. Couldn't they have found a native speaker to teach him the correct pronounciation?
As for the rest of his part in the movie - speaking English with a sharp s and a rolling r doesn't make a German accent yet.

On the other hand - he's Scottish. How about him as the new Connor?
 
Temis the Vorta said:
Competent actors can imitate whatever accent is required of them. The casting departments job is to keep auditioning actors till they find some who can.

Of course such considerations are often overruled by other factors much as the box office value of a high profile actors name.
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Though sometimes going with a relative unknown can work, i.e. Christopher Reeve in Superman: The Movie
 
True, but usually the producers play it safe and go for the well known names. Especially now with the economoic crisis they won't afford to take any risks.

Relatively unknown actors only get a leading role in series and soaps nowadays, but never in feature movies. And the more famous actors won't play in series as they are afraid they might miss a good feature movie contract at best or forever get type-cast in the future at worst. Both results in a division of actors, with an isolated group of feature actors on one side and series actors on the other. Only very few actors manage to do both. LeVar Burton, for example (Roots & TNG)
 
Rhubarbodendron said:
For the original ancient times feeling you need a British accent to give it credibility.
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Apparently, this is true - no matter where the ancient times are set. That must be why the HBO series' Rome was performed entirely in British accents, which I found infinitely distracting - as I do in HBO's Game of Thrones, a story by an American author about a fantasy land, where everyone is British for some unbeknownst reason, even fantastic lead (American) actor, Peter Dinklage.

PS - 1600 is not "ancient times", it's medieval times (barely), and if you want credibility, let's have it performed in Middle English with subtitles.

On topic - Ryan Reynolds is a good choice commercially, and honestly no weirder than casting Adrian Paul (another good-looking, limited range actor) for the tv series. Let's face it, quality has never been a major factor in the Highlander franchise. Here's hoping they can break out of the highly formulaic construction and start at the core concept, which is what has always been interesting about the whole thing.
 
Middle English with subtitles would be awesome! I'd love that!! =)
Btw, I so agree on 1600 being rather recent, but with regards to the fact that most members here are American and think in a very different time frame from us Europeans and Asians with our several milennia of documented history, I chose to word my statement as I did.

I beg to differ on the point that quality appears to be no major factor in the Highlander franchise. While this might have been the case in the movies, it wasn't in the series. Peter Wingfield is one of the best actors I've ever seen. Incredibly versatile, with a deep understanding of what a character needs to come alife and, above all, able to act well even when the script or the directing is utterly bad (The Source!). Getting him into the show was coincidence, but keeping him as a regular was a deliberate decision, based on the quality of his performance. In fact, when the budget was getting smaller, they decided to keep him and instead write Stan Kirsch out of the series, based on Mr Wingfield's qualities as an actor, in spite of Mr Kirsch having been a regular from episode 1 on (actually, the very first scene in the very first epi showed him, if I recall correctly).

[edited to add: By no means do I mean to imply that Stan Kirsch is a bad actor! Quite the contrary, he was remarkably good for someone that young. Mr Wingfield just happened to be better at that time. There is no shame in being second.]
 
Seriously? We Americans are too ignorant to understand your highfalutin point unless you refer to the 1600s incorrectly as ancient?

*Whisper* You may not realize, but America was formed from colonies of Europeans and later grew with the constant stream of immigrants from all other nations. We get to think in the frame of world history as much as any other citizenry and understand that time didn't begin with the Declaration of Independence.

Your assumption that Americans as a group don't know or care about the history of their own bloodlines tracing back to the 'old country' and beyond is, frankly, offensive. Then again, why admit you made a mistake when you can brush it off as dumbing things down for the local yokels?
 
No, I didn't mean to imply you are ignorant. It's just that the average American I met uses a different timeframe, most of the time. I wouldn't dream of calling either right or wrong - it's just different. Picture it like Immortals and Mortals. One of Amanda's shopping trips might easily take a decade, but that doesn't make her less human or less amiable than Joe, for example. Same lives, only different frames of reference.

Sadly, most Americans I have previousely met were not consciousely aware of their European ancestry. In fact, many desperately ignored it and got outright pissed once someone mentioned it. I got flamed more than once when reminding Americans of their heritage. Those countrymen (and -women) of yours regularly referred exclusively to the 200+ years of US history and had big issues with Europeans calling the span of those two centuries short.

I can not express how pleased I am to see that you are none of them!

Please understand that my previous experiences have led me to always assume the worst and hence to underrate you. I didn't mean to offend you or your people and should have taken into consideration that Highlander fans would have no problem thinking in milennia.



Do you still want my head or could we agree on an armistice until the Gathering?
 
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Lapis Exilis said:
Rhubarbodendron said:
For the original ancient times feeling you need a British accent to give it credibility.
Click to expand...

Apparently, this is true - no matter where the ancient times are set. That must be why the HBO series' Rome was performed entirely in British accents, which I found infinitely distracting - as I do in HBO's Game of Thrones, a story by an American author about a fantasy land, where everyone is British for some unbeknownst reason, even fantastic lead (American) actor, Peter Dinklage.

PS - 1600 is not "ancient times", it's medieval times (barely), and if you want credibility, let's have it performed in Middle English with subtitles.

On topic - Ryan Reynolds is a good choice commercially, and honestly no weirder than casting Adrian Paul (another good-looking, limited range actor) for the tv series. Let's face it, quality has never been a major factor in the Highlander franchise. Here's hoping they can break out of the highly formulaic construction and start at the core concept, which is what has always been interesting about the whole thing.
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You can't do historic stuff with an American accent. You personally may not be happy about it, but it's true. It's a modern accent and it grates.

Re rebooting Highlander, I liked the first movie and the TV show, but the whole Highlander premise / universe / continuity became laughable.

Much as I dislike reboots, it could do with one...
 
Relayer1 said:
Lapis Exilis said:
Rhubarbodendron said:
For the original ancient times feeling you need a British accent to give it credibility.
Click to expand...

Apparently, this is true - no matter where the ancient times are set. That must be why the HBO series' Rome was performed entirely in British accents, which I found infinitely distracting - as I do in HBO's Game of Thrones, a story by an American author about a fantasy land, where everyone is British for some unbeknownst reason, even fantastic lead (American) actor, Peter Dinklage.

PS - 1600 is not "ancient times", it's medieval times (barely), and if you want credibility, let's have it performed in Middle English with subtitles.

On topic - Ryan Reynolds is a good choice commercially, and honestly no weirder than casting Adrian Paul (another good-looking, limited range actor) for the tv series. Let's face it, quality has never been a major factor in the Highlander franchise. Here's hoping they can break out of the highly formulaic construction and start at the core concept, which is what has always been interesting about the whole thing.
Click to expand...

You can't do historic stuff with an American accent. You personally may not be happy about it, but it's true. It's a modern accent and it grates.
Click to expand...


It is in no way more accurate or convincing to have an ancient Roman, a medieval Scotsman, or the lord of a castle of Westeros speak in a 21st century British accent, which is, I regret to inform you, exactly as modern as a 21st century American accent. When you're talking about a 400 year old guy who was born in Scotland, and has then lived the rest his life all over the world, his accent is much more likely to sound like the people he's lived around for the last twenty years than anything else. My mother's best friend was born in China, spent years in Mexico and has lived in Chicago for the last 25 years. She sounds almost exactly like my stepdad, who has lived his entire 75 years in Chicago. It's a very odd person who holds onto the accent of their birth even across a mortal's lifespan. That's why it was vaguely ridiculous to have Duncan running around speaking with a (bad) Scottish accent, and it's even sillier to insist that Connor have a Scottish accent. Ideally, the actor playing Connor would be able to do a Scottish accent (but not too much of one since pretty much only Scots can understand Scots) for the Highland scenes, French, British or wherever else Connor might be living in other flashback scenes, and a modern American accent for the 21st century scenes.
 
Relayer1, i feel a bit like you. Remakes are hardly ever as good as the originals. Yet after such a long time of Highlander-withdrawal I, too, would love to see something remotely new, even if it was only a remake.

There is one exception, though: the Source was pretty awful imho. If I had the money I'd immediately do a new version of that movie with the same cast (except for Giovanni, perhaps). The actors did their very best under the circumstances but they had no chance against a bad script, bad directing and too many rich and therefore influential people forcing alterations all the time (the latter is a bit of info I got straight from the horse's mouth: Jim Byrnes told me when I met him after a concert in Belgium in October 2010).

Yet the idea per se had incredible potential. This could be a glorious movie, on the same level as Comes a Horseman/Revelation 6.8 All it'd need to become that are a few expurgations from the script, better costumes and about 200 lbs less silicone and make up.
 
If they remake Highlander then i vote for Clancy Brown to play the Kurgan. He was so awesome and totally owns that role that for myself at least i dont think anyone could replace him it would just be another actor doing a Kurgan impression that isnt half as good as the original.
 
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