3 Celebrities You Idolize (And The 3 You Resemble Instead)
A lot of us don't measure up to our idols. Like the little league ballplayers who dream of being Derek Jeter but grow up to be high school gym teachers. Or the young mall-rat divas aspiring to be Christina Aguilera who end up performing on Carnival cruise lines. But what about people who are distinct successes, but still want to be some wholly other thing? In the early '80s, Eddie Murphy apparently wasn't content being the world's most popular comedian and movie star, so he decided to become Rick James for awhile.
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Monsters: Vampire vs. Werewolf
The Dream: The VampireI started compiling a list of things that attract me to vampires, and a funny thing happened: It was somewhat similar to my list of David Bowie attributes. Indeed, Bowie even played a vampire in 1982's The Hunger. Solid casting, as I enjoy the notion of the vampire as an elegant man about England, well-dressed, sophisticated, eloquent and impossibly seductive to women.Yes, I know Bram Stoker's Dracula looked a lot more like the one in
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Was There a Point to This?
Yeah, I think so. Obviously, these examples are very specific to me. I get that. And I also appreciate that splitting my psyche open on the sharpened slate of the Internet has a limited appeal. But I do think there is a larger general point, and it's NOT "just be yourself."While there are dangers in straying from what you do best or ignoring your true calling to forcibly insert yourself into some other mold, I think it has value, too. Neil Simon, the playwright and screenwriter famous for The Odd Couple, The Sunshine Boys and Murder by Death, said that he wanted to write his comedies like Eugene O'Neill wrote his dramas. In using one of the greatest dramatists as his source, Simon wrote some of the most well-regarded and successful comedies of his generation. I admire that commitment to going outside your comfort zone in the hope of being better than you are. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. I think we can all agree that me gaying it up a la Bowie hand gestures for my '90s grunge band wasn't terribly successful.
For more from Gladstone, check out Was 'Arrested Development' A Remake of a 70s Sitcom? and Dr. Strange The Movie: Why It's Not as Crazy As It Sounds.