Sean Bean would make the perfect Jaime Lannister

[rusty_halo]

* South Park is awesome.

* Veronica Mars is boring.

* queenofthorns was right; young Sean Bean would make the perfect Jaime Lannister.

I say this because I just watched the latest from Netflix, Inspector Morse 24: Absolute Conviction. This is an episode of an English detective series from 1992, guest-starring Sean Bean.

He's only in it for about 10 minutes, but between this and Sharpe, I'm thoroughly convinced that he's the ideal Jaime Lannister. His character in this is a semi-bad guy: cold, arrogant, and mocking, but with a simmering anger underneath, and apparently some genuine love for his wife. You could *so* totally see him as Jaime in all those classic moments: coldly ordering Ned's men killed, flashing his cruel smirk, while underneath he is terribly worried about Tyrion and bitter towards Ned; telling Cat that he tossed her kid off a tower, indifference and mockery masking his self-loathing; threatening to send Edmure's newborn baby back to him with a trebuchet.

And, of course, with Sharpe we see Sean Bean playing a character who is a warrior, whose first reaction to any problem is to solve it with violence, and who has an idealistic/romantic core. So he could also play the impetuous warrior side of Jaime and the decent side of Jaime, disillusioned idealist that he is.

Oh yeah, and he's stunningly beautiful, with golden hair, green eyes, and high cheekbones.

See, it didn't quite work for me before, probably because I was thinking of older Sean Bean, who is too rugged to fit that "mirror image of his twin, the beautiful queen," thing that Jaime has going. But younger Sean Bean? Perfect.

Speaking of Jaime, there's a nice discussion of his character development here on the ASOIAF forum.

* I also watched Lady Chatterly (thanks to Sean Bean I've watched more British television in the past two months than I've ever seen in my life). It reminded me that I despise love stories. On the plus side, Sean Bean is very beautiful and occasionally naked in it. And I did like the end; the characters actually had the guts to do what I would've done, which was to say "fuck you" to society and to run away (to Canada!) together. On a metaphorical level, it was more about the irrelevance of the class system, so that was cool.

Comments

[queenofthorns.livejournal.com]

I think Young Sean Bean (especially circa “Stormy Monday”) really fits that reputation of Young Jaime’s as incredibly beautiful. (I see the older, more worn-down Bean as being Jaime, circa AFFC – he’s described as thin and with his face lined and with some gray in the gold of his hair – and I think he’s still beautiful but in a different way!)

I like that adaptation of “Lady Chatterley” not solely because of the Beanie nekkidness, but because you’re right, the class-conflict is made very clear (Lady Chatterley’s shame is that her lover is the gamekeeper, not that she HAS a lover who made her pregnant, which after all, her husband even urged her to do, AND Mellors’ own milieu hate him for thinking he’s better than they are, or however they perceive it!) I also like that Mellors has a kind of angry bitterness to him (I like my Bean angry and bitter) later on, when he realizes that love isn’t enough. (Except it is, which makes my romantic heart happy!) Also, Ken Russell really toned down a lot of the D.H. Lawrence-ness of it all!

I liked the ONE person's arguments on the Westeros forum, but a lot of people there just annoy me by repeating, over and over again, "Jaime will never change" when it's so obvious that HE HAS. Argh!