Who’s That Meant To Be?
Watching the Bob Hawke telemovie the night after an election had been called made for an odd experience. As the parade of lookalikes began, I kept imagining what a telemovie called Gillard would look like. Who would essay the title role (Jane Turner, surely) and who would play Tony Abbott, and would he be sporting the lollybags and bathing cap in every single scene, including those depicting fierce debates in the Lower House?
Like everyone I’ve spoken to, I found it impossible to concentrate on the film’s narrative – the usual ‘ghost train’ approach to a public figure’s life (‘Look, there’s the bit where he wore the America’s Cup jacket’) – as I was spending all my time evaluating whether the actors looked enough like who they were supposed to be. Would it have been better with David Field, who did Hawkie in The Night They Called it a Day? Didn’t the bloke doing Keating used to be the camp hairdresser in the Decoré ad? Is that Bill Kelty or Matt Lucas from Little Britain? Is that Graham Richardson or Griff Rhys-Jones? Is that Gerry Hand or Brick Tamland? Who’s Josh Lawson meant to be? And where’s Gareth Evans? (‘Gareth’s stuck in Jakarta’, a line of dialogue informed us, and you could feel the entire nation’s disappointment.)
While there is no correlation between the degree to which an actor resembles the real person and the excellence of their acting – Martin Landau doesn’t really look anything like Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood and yet it’s one of the best ‘impersonations’ ever; likewise Philip Baker Hall as Richard Nixon in Secret Honor, Philip Seymour Hoffman as Truman Capote in Capote, and Philip Brady as Austin Powers on an episode of Good Morning Australia in 2002 – this is, nonetheless, something that everyone has an opinion about. The Herald Sun regularly features photographs of actors playing famous people in upcoming films and TV shows, accompanied by estimations of how good the production is going to be based solely on how much the actor (often snapped en route to the set in harsh natural light) resembles the subject. This week there were letters to the editor claiming that Richard Roxburgh as Hawke didn’t work because ‘his face wasn’t wide enough’.
Recently, I bumped into actor Patrick Brammall on the set of The Librarians and he happened to mention that he was playing Kim Beazley in the then-upcoming Hawke. ‘But surely you wouldn’t be fat enough?’ I blurted, immediately feeling like an arsehole as his face informed me that I was probably the one-thousandth person to have said this to him. I thought he looked extremely Beazley-like in the final sequence, where Hawkie makes his emotional farewell speech, although I was distracted throughout by the non-appearance of Paul Keating. Where was he? Going by the tenor of both the writing and performance, somewhere deep beneath Parliament House, wearing a cape and playing an enormous pipe organ.
Sometimes the actor looks exactly like his subject, but the voice isn’t right. This problem was solved in the case of the aforementioned Ed Wood. Vincent D’Onofrio’s physical resemblance to Orson Welles is perhaps the best lookalike ever seen in a movie, but his voice had to be overdubbed by the brilliant Canadian voice-over artiste Maurice LaMarche. When D’Onofrio used his own voice to play Orson in the short film Five Minutes, Mr Welles, the results were akin to the exposure of Jean Hagen’s character at the end of Singin’ in the Rain. On the other hand, a startling resemblance to a public figure is all for nought if the script is a dud. I’m sure there are those reading this who are old enough to recall a movie called The Man with Bogart’s Face. ‘He may have had Bogart’s face,’ said my friend Pieter as we left the cinema. ‘But his acting was worse than Truman Capote’s in Murder by Death’, then our yardstick for poor performances. Capote, essentially playing himself, had looked exactly like his subject, but appeared to be reading all his lines off cards through glasses that weren’t his own.
One approach that, for me, never works is when you have one icon playing another. In The Night We Called it a Day, Frank Sinatra is played by the equally legendary Dennis Hopper. Dennis puts in, but you constantly find yourself thinking, ‘Why is Dennis Hopper being held hostage in that hotel?’ I so wish he had chosen to sing ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’ in his own voice rather than miming to Frank’s. One of the biggest laughs I ever got on stage was when, upon the film’s release, I performed the song as Frank Booth from Blue Velvet. I didn’t even have to change the lyrics…
Don’t you know, little fool, you never can win
Use your mentality, wake up to reality
I’ve got you…under my skin
Man.
Most of all, I wonder what the person being impersonated must think when they watch a movie like Hawke. How much would you have loved to be a fly on the wall at Paul Keating’s place on Sunday night? Unlike with the movie, I’m sure the ‘c**ts’ would have been unbeeped. What did Caroline Aherne think when she went to 24 Hour Party People and saw her ex-husband, Peter Hook from New Order, played by the bloke who’d played her younger brother, Anthony, on The Royle Family for all those years? Maybe that’s what sent her round the twist.
It is quite a shock to see or hear yourself ‘done’, even if, like me, you’re someone who’s spent half their life impersonating others. Jason Stephens used to do a hilariously accurate impression of my loping walk, and I’ll never forget the day some kids from a student radio station sent in a tape of themselves doing a scathing parody of Martin/Molloy. The bloke playing me had my fluctuating accent down pat, and I hadn’t till that moment realised how often I used the word ‘absolutely’.
‘That sounds nothing like me,’ I said, as everyone always does.
‘Shall we write back and tell them that?’ asked my producer.
‘Absolutely,’ I replied.
Tony Martin is the Melbourne-based author of ‘A Nest of Occasionals’ and ‘Lolly Scramble’. Podcasts of his radio show ‘Get This’ are still available for free download at iTunes (type in: ‘Get This: Richard Marsland Lives’). He is currently directing new episodes of ABCTV's ‘The Librarians’.
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