Paul Bettany, a British actor whose work I really like, seems to have chosen a fascinating trajectory for his career. Intermixed with his more mainstream roles, he keeps coming back to a very particular one:<\/p>\n
He is, in many appearances, the best friend and intellectual confidente<\/i> of the main character. This is, of course, an honored tradition, going back to Nigel Bruce, Burt Ward, Vivian Vance and Donald O’Connor.<\/p>\n
But sometimes Bettany’s character has a particular twist.<\/p>\n
In “A Beautiful Mind”, his character was never seen by anyone other than the main character, John Nash.<\/p>\n
By the Iron Man films, he had completely disappeared from sight, appearing only as a voice. Even Tony Stark himself — the many responsible for his very existence — cannot see Jarvis.<\/p>\n
This progressive invisibility of signature roles is so striking that I need to ask: Is this all really a coincidence?<\/p>\n
In any case, it could be argued that these roles have increased his visibility.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Paul Bettany, a British actor whose work I really like, seems to have chosen a fascinating trajectory for his career. Intermixed with his more mainstream roles, he keeps coming back to a very particular one: He is, in many appearances, the best friend and intellectual confidente of the main character. This is, of course, an … Continue reading “The man who wasn’t there”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15171"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15171"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15171\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15174,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15171\/revisions\/15174"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}