Matthew Goode is Finally Allowed to be HOT in A Discovery of Witches
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Blessed be this tall drink of English vampire
Matthew Goode has always been a peculiarly underused actor in my opinion. It seems like casting directors and whoever else puts together films/tv shows see him and think: “Hm…not hit with the ugly stick Englishman who can be suave and clever, but he is not our idea of a leading man — ugh why is he SO MUCH taller than me - NEXT!”
Or something like that. Who knows what these producer types think.
So he doesn’t get into the room for the Hugh Grant/Colin Firth-type roles they should be throwing his way by this stage in his career.
Or maybe he himself has resisted being typecast, maybe he knows he is more than just a leading man. But he doesn’t quite fit a true character actor mold either. Because he is HOT.
He did make one awkwardly bad rom-com (Leap Year — so bad it’s good in my opinion, forgive Matthew his leprechaun-ish Irish accent if you will!), and then fell into more supporting player paycheck type roles in films like Imitation Game and various tv series.
He had an early fun turn in his career as villain Adrien Veidt/Ozymandius in Watchmen. OK so wait — I only just realized in researching this that he played the same character in the Watchmen film that Jeremy Irons played in the tv series, which is weird because they also played the same character in different versions of Brideshead Revisited!
I have always thought they possessed a very similar quality as actors.
Irons’ unapologetically lusty romantic characters of his youth (I’m thinking of The French Lietenenant’s Woman, Damage, etc.) are roles that Goode could easily play today if they weren’t being hoovered up by the Cumberbatches (*cough* overrated) of the world.
Matthew Goode also has that same dreamy, unaffected quality that young Irons had. An unbothered, fizzy, sophisticated charm, in a slim, tall English glass. Sigh.
In more recent times Goode was cast in unfortunately boring roles in Downton Abbey and The Crown. He got to play a bit of a cad as Princess Margaret’s playboy photographer husband, Lord Snowden, but he was mostly there to be a supporting player.
