My brain decided to have another epiphany so here we go.
Some people don’t like Jamie Campbell Bower as Lestat because “he looks too weird”.
I am going to point out that Lestat was born in the late 1700s. Many of you already knew this, of course. However, something people fail to keep in mind is that back then, modern medicine, cosmetology, and dentistry did not exist yet.
You would be extremely lucky to have what today considers ‘perfect teeth’, where they are stark-white and completely straight, free of cosmetic blemishes.
As someone that has had braces in her past to fix a rather nasty snaggletooth problem, I can vouch for the fact that how your teeth look in an ‘architectural sense’, affects the way the rest of your face looks as well. It affects your jawline and most importantly, your side profile. My two front incisors used to overlap and I looked very odd, to say the least. I think I still look a little odd, but not really in a bad way. After I got my braces off, my side profile changed completely because my teeth gave me a slight overbite because of how they sat. What I lack in some areas of ‘aesthetically pleasing’ features, I make up for in others.
Why is this included in here, of all places? Because it provides a scientific viewpoint which others might overlook. Do you recall how dirty Louis and Claudia’s teeth were in the movie for Interview with the Vampire and how their transformations whitened their teeth and enhanced their natural beauty? Vampirism takes what is naturally beautiful about you, and enhances it to as perfect as it can get.
To say that Lestat was “aesthetically perfect” in every way as a mortal would be entirely unrealistic, to me. Nobody’s face claim is going to be ‘perfect’ for Lestat, not even Jamie Campbell Bower.
There will always be inconsistencies, everywhere you look. But it’s not really even whether or not I find him perfect. It’s his imperfections that make him perfect, to me. And perhaps that’s what Magnus found in Lestat – his imperfections gave him an indescribable yet authentic beauty and Magnus wanted to immortalize those features by turning Lestat into a vampire, even thought Lestat did not want it. It was okay with Magnus that Lestat had a few things here and there that weren’t completely perfect; he found him extraordinarily beautiful, regardless.
Personality has a lot of importance to me when choosing face claims for the characters I portray. The reason people like RPing with my characters is my characterization and attention to detail. I try my best to bring the people I write to life in the most accurate way I possibly can, taking into consideration how much I know about that character. Some people I have written with in the past have poor characterization and that in itself makes it hard for me to write with certain individuals. I feel like I’m talking to the writer, not the character.
While I have seen a lot of wonderful face claims for Lestat, and all of them are beautiful in their own ways to me (especially Jeremy Dufour), I like Jamie because he has a TON of videos, pictures and gifs where I can look at them and say “I see Lestat, there”. The other face claims are nice too, but some of them are obscure enough to where they don’t have barely any pictures.
Let’s be real here, people. Lestat is, or would be, a total camera whore.
Anyway, that concludes my little essay and another section of my silly little “Why I Use JCB For Lestat Chronicles”.
I-want-my-IWTV 