Thread title: Chastain too hot for McAvoy
OP: No offence to McAvoy he’s good looking. But come on he’s no Fassbender
– user GavinHeisenberg (thread opener) on the IMDB boards (TDoER)
Chastain is indeed very pretty but not to a point where she’s practically Barbie. Her complexion and overall waifishness lends her an ethereal, wraith-like quality yet she still seems to be grounded by a sense of worldliness. Beautiful, but not unbelievably so. And that’s one of the things I consider as real beauty. She could play a fragile fairy or a tough-as-nails human and I won’t have a single problem buying either.
But surely there are better examples to use than Fassbender? The guy is good-looking (I suppose) but he looks way too menacing for me to ever consider him as comfortably charming. He has terrific chops but I find it a bit hard to buy him in an earnest, honest-to-goodness good-guy role. The most I can buy him in when it comes to good-guy roles is a sort-of decent fellow and that’s it, and that’s all owing only to his skills as an actor. He just doesn’t seem to have the facial bearing for anything nicer than that. So no, I’ll never be able to buy him as Conor Ludlow. Maybe we’ll be able to see him in a movie with Chastain someday and audience can enjoy whatever sexual tension to be had between the two but as far as this one goes, I just don’t see it.
I tried to imagine someone else who’d be considered as classically handsome today in the role of Conor and the best I could come up with was Matt Bomer. Guy can pull off good guy but his looks are such that would distract from the earnest and emotional storytelling that they’re trying to present in Rigby, which is supposed to be less fairytale-ish and more true to life. Someone like Bomer, chops or no, would take viewers away from that. And then you’ll have Chastain’s more subtle pretty looks being overshadowed by all that impossible beauty, which would in turn, undermine her performance. She played off well with Pitt in The Tree of Life, because Pitt, while still very handsome, isn’t the pretty boy he used to be back in the day, and can now more-than-decently pull off the role of a tired middle-aged man (which is why I found his performance so enjoyable in Moneyball, along with Jonah Hill’s). And I think he’s all the better for it now.
McAvoy…is a fellow who looks good on camera and whose demeanor, attitude and aura seem to enhance what are otherwise decent looks in the flesh (based on accounts by people who have seen him in person). He’s in a different class altogether. Kind of like the one Gary Oldman is in. And I think Ewan McGregor and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, as well. Chameleon actors like them make the characters only as attractive as they need to be. Meaning, even if the characters are supposed to be off-the-scale attractive or physically off-putting these actors somehow manage to pull it off but when they’re only supposed to be mildly attractive, well, it’s obviously not going to be a problem for these actors. The latter, however, is not something that devastatingly good-looking actors like Bomer can pull off because would you ever seriously consider someone like him to be reasonably attractive but otherwise merely an average joe?
The other actor they had locked in for the role of Conor before he had to drop out, Joel Edgerton, might’ve worked just as well as McAvoy, looks-wise, I think, although he doesn’t exactly scream good-guy to me. Either way, it goes without saying that his Conor would definitely have been a different one than McAvoy’s. I’m not sure what Edgerton’s Conor would have been like but McAvoy, when he plays good guys, exudes goodness from his very pores to his eyeballs and if you add a downtrodden effect to it, it’s game over for the audience, hook, line, sinker, scaled and filleted.
So I find nothing to complain about in terms of the casting of McAvoy with Chastain. Besides, he makes a dashingly charming beau to her breathtakingly lovely bride: http://akirasouchan.tumblr.com/post/90071896753
I see this picture, and if I hadn’t known better, I’d think it was a candid shot of a nicely balanced (in terms of physical looks) real life newly-wedded couple rather than a staged shot of a make-believe one.
Spiels 
Blah-blah-blah #005
Thread title: Chastain too hot for McAvoy
OP: No offence to McAvoy he’s good looking. But come on he’s no Fassbender
– user GavinHeisenberg (thread opener) on the IMDB boards (TDoER)
Chastain is indeed very pretty but not to a point where she’s practically Barbie. Her complexion and overall waifishness lends her an ethereal, wraith-like quality yet she still seems to be grounded by a sense of worldliness. Beautiful, but not unbelievably so. And that’s one of the things I consider as real beauty. She could play a fragile fairy or a tough-as-nails human and I won’t have a single problem buying either.
But surely there are better examples to use than Fassbender? The guy is good-looking (I suppose) but he looks way too menacing for me to ever consider him as comfortably charming. He has terrific chops but I find it a bit hard to buy him in an earnest, honest-to-goodness good-guy role. The most I can buy him in when it comes to good-guy roles is a sort-of decent fellow and that’s it, and that’s all owing only to his skills as an actor. He just doesn’t seem to have the facial bearing for anything nicer than that. So no, I’ll never be able to buy him as Conor Ludlow. Maybe we’ll be able to see him in a movie with Chastain someday and audience can enjoy whatever sexual tension to be had between the two but as far as this one goes, I just don’t see it.
I tried to imagine someone else who’d be considered as classically handsome today in the role of Conor and the best I could come up with was Matt Bomer. Guy can pull off good guy but his looks are such that would distract from the earnest and emotional storytelling that they’re trying to present in Rigby, which is supposed to be less fairytale-ish and more true to life. Someone like Bomer, chops or no, would take viewers away from that. And then you’ll have Chastain’s more subtle pretty looks being overshadowed by all that impossible beauty, which would in turn, undermine her performance. She played off well with Pitt in The Tree of Life, because Pitt, while still very handsome, isn’t the pretty boy he used to be back in the day, and can now more-than-decently pull off the role of a tired middle-aged man (which is why I found his performance so enjoyable in Moneyball, along with Jonah Hill’s). And I think he’s all the better for it now.
McAvoy…is a fellow who looks good on camera and whose demeanor, attitude and aura seem to enhance what are otherwise decent looks in the flesh (based on accounts by people who have seen him in person). He’s in a different class altogether. Kind of like the one Gary Oldman is in. And I think Ewan McGregor and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, as well. Chameleon actors like them make the characters only as attractive as they need to be. Meaning, even if the characters are supposed to be off-the-scale attractive or physically off-putting these actors somehow manage to pull it off but when they’re only supposed to be mildly attractive, well, it’s obviously not going to be a problem for these actors. The latter, however, is not something that devastatingly good-looking actors like Bomer can pull off because would you ever seriously consider someone like him to be reasonably attractive but otherwise merely an average joe?
The other actor they had locked in for the role of Conor before he had to drop out, Joel Edgerton, might’ve worked just as well as McAvoy, looks-wise, I think, although he doesn’t exactly scream good-guy to me. Either way, it goes without saying that his Conor would definitely have been a different one than McAvoy’s. I’m not sure what Edgerton’s Conor would have been like but McAvoy, when he plays good guys, exudes goodness from his very pores to his eyeballs and if you add a downtrodden effect to it, it’s game over for the audience, hook, line, sinker, scaled and filleted.
So I find nothing to complain about in terms of the casting of McAvoy with Chastain. Besides, he makes a dashingly charming beau to her breathtakingly lovely bride: http://akirasouchan.tumblr.com/post/90071896753
I see this picture, and if I hadn’t known better, I’d think it was a candid shot of a nicely balanced (in terms of physical looks) real life newly-wedded couple rather than a staged shot of a make-believe one.