12 Book Characters Whose Look Didn’t Match Their Movie Version

Nowadays it’s extremely common to see literary works make the jump to the world of cinema and television. Whether it’s a story for children that makes it into an animated film or a whole fantasy saga that gets turned into a successful TV show, the possibilities are endless. However, every once in a while the book characters look slightly different in the screens, which can cause uproars with the fans.

Now I’ve Seen Everything compared how a few characters are described in the books to the appearance of their movie counterpart. Some of the changes are mind-blowing!

Daario Naharis, Game of Thrones

The appearance of Daario Naharis in the Game of Thrones series is very different from the book version. George Martin describes him like this, “Daario Naharis was flamboyant even for a Tyroshi. His beard was cut into 3 prongs and dyed blue, the same color as his eyes and the curly hair that fell to his collar. His pointed mustache was painted gold.”

Becky Sharp, Vanity Fair

Becky Sharp, the character of William Thackeray’s novel Vanity Fair, has reddish hair and green eyes. It feels as if this appearance opposes the bold and brave Becky to the shy blue-eyed Amelia Sedley. In the mini-series based on the book and released in 2018, the role of the cunning and hard-tempered character was given to the brown-eyed and dark-haired actress, Olivia Cooke.

Petunia Dursley, Harry Potter

Harry Potter’s aunt Petunia Dursley also went through a serious metamorphosis as well. She turned from a slim blonde woman with a long neck and an “almost horse-like” face, into a dark-haired woman with a fit body and a normal neck in the screen adaptation.

Grandmaster, Thor: Ragnarok

In the comics, Grandmaster is a man with blue skin, a big head, and yellow eyes without pupils. But the director of the film, Taika Waititi, decided to change the appearance to prevent viewers from having flashbacks of Earth Girls Are Easy where Jeff Goldblum portrayed a blue alien. Also, Waititi didn’t want to hide the appearance of the actor under makeup.

You can still see the leftovers of the canon look of Grandmaster: a blue line on the chin, the same-colored nails, and the blue color of his lower eyelids.

Natasha Rostova, War and Peace

In the mini-series War and Peace, Natasha Rostova was played by Lily James who has few things in common with her character. Leo Tolstoy described Natasha as “the black-eyed girl with a large mouth, not pretty, but vivacious with her childlike open shoulders that slipped out of her corset from running, with black curls that had blown back, thin bared arms, and little feet in lace pantalettes and open shoes, was in that charming stage when a girl is already not a child, but a child is not yet a maiden.”

Elsa, Frozen

Elsa seems to have captivated young and old with her values, enthusiasm, and warmth, although, ironically, she is the adaptation of the Snow Queen. In Hans Christian Andersen’s original tale, the queen is depicted as a living ice queen dressed in white and shrouded in sparkles, while in the adaptation, we see her as human.

Katniss Everdeen, The Hunger Games

In Suzanne Collins’s trilogy The Hunger Games, Katniss Everdeen has dark curly hair, olive skin, and dark-gray eyes. She also has a remarkable hairstyle — a long braid falling onto her back. At the same time, Jennifer Lawrence who played the role of Katniss has a nice body shape and she’s tall. However, the character in the book is described as thin and short, but physically strong because she had to provide food for her entire family by hunting in the woods.

Emma Bovary, Madame Bovary

Gustave Flaubert depicted Madame Bovary as a woman who made men go crazy with the combination of her incredibly white skin and dark eyes and hair. Isabelle Huppert who embodied the image of this femme fatale in the movie Madame Bovary (1991), is the owner of a completely different color type, but she undoubtedly played this role perfectly.

Hermione, Harry Potter

We can hardly imagine the 3 friends from Harry Potter with a different appearance today. But they did look different in the books. For example, Hermione from the book is a girl with bushy brown hair and rather large front teeth. Initially, JK Rowling depicted Hermione as an “ugly duckling” but eventually the role was played by the attractive Emma Watson.

George Duroy, Bel Ami

It was Robert Pattinson, the star of The Twilight series, who got the main role in the screen version of Guy de Maupassant’s novel Bel Ami. However, the famous French novelist depicted George Duroy as a blonde man with a twirled mustache.

Frodo Baggins, The Lord of the Rings

According to Gandalf, in The Lord of the Rings book, Frodo is a stout rosy-cheeked hobbit, taller than the rest, with blond hair, a cleft chin, and clear eyes.

Jo, Little Women

In the last screen version of Louisa May Alcott’s novel Little Women, the role of Jo was played by Saoirse Ronan. The actress has pale skin, while the author of the book presented the girl as dark-skinned, “Jo was very tall, thin, and brown, and reminded one of a colt.” Though the rest of the description matches the actress’s appearance well, “She had a decided mouth, a comical nose, and sharp, gray eyes, which appeared to see everything, and were by turns fierce, funny, or thoughtful.”

Is it important for you that the on-screen character matches the book prototype? Or is the actor’s talent the priority?