Fictional crush challenge addendum

On By EstherIn Actors, At the movies, Literature & Books, Richard Armitage, TV & media

I just finished my 10 days, 10 fictional crushes challenge yesterday but as I am someone who develops crushes all the time, I decided on a bonus edition. So, here are some images of other fictional crushes that I’ve had that didn’t make it into the 10 days. This time I’m sticking to few or no explanations, as was originally intended.

Let me start with a daddy crush on Charles Ingalls/Pa (Michael Landon) in Little House on the Prairie…

Gilbert Blythe (Jonathan Crombie) from Anne of Green Gables from when I was a teen.

I also really like Anne with an E‘s Gilbert (Lucas Zumann)…

…but he’s the age of my son, so it’s more like a mommy-crush. I keep on wanting to take care of him because he is an orphan and I keep on wanting him to be happy with his girl. I made a ton of Anne with an E (and Gilbert) videos, viewable here.

Joe Bradley (Gregory Peck) in Roman Holiday…

James McKay (also Gregory Peck) in The Big Country...

Captain Keith Mallory (Gregory Peck) in The Guns of Navarone…

Sebastian Flyte (Anthony Andrews) in Brideshead Revisited…

Sir Percy Blakeney (also Anthony Andrews) in The Scarlet Pimpernel…

Don Pedro (Denzel Washington) in Much Ado About Nothing. Beatrice should have accepted him…

Harry Kennedy (Richard Armitage) in The Vicar of Dibley…

John Porter (Richard Armitage) in Strike Back….

Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage) in The Hobbit…

Neo (Keanu Reeves) in The Matrix…

Alex Wyler (also Keanu Reeves) in The Lake House…

Remington Steele (baby Pierce Brosnan) in the 1980s tv show of the same name…

Daniel Rafferty (Pierce Brosnan) in Laws of Attraction. For me, sexier than James Bond…

I made a couple of Pierce Brosnan videos for Remington Steele, Laws of Attraction and Love is all you need, to be seen here if you’re so inclined.

Not normally a Mr. Bingley fan but I love this Mr. Bingley (Naveen Andrews) for this scene in Bride and Prejudice. I can’t tell you how often I have seen this clip. This is the sexiest Bingley I know.

Thor (Chris Hemsworth) from the Thor Avengers movies.

Doctor Lucien Blake (Craig McLachlan) from The Doctor Blake Mysteries. This is the only one on the list where I’m not so fond of the actor himself but I do really like the character and he does a great job bringing that character to life.

And finally, Sebastian Lacroix, or Bash, (Dalmar Abuzeid) from Anne with an E…

OK, now this really is it and I am finally, truly ending this challenge. These were the honorary mentions; I’m probably missing a few more but it should still be enough.

30 thoughts on “Fictional crush challenge addendum”

  1. Some of those like Anthony Andrews are walking down memory lane! My parents were huge Brideshead Revisited fans and I remember Anthony from a few Love Boat episodes and thought he was so dashing!$
    Harry is course!! I also think Remington Steele was terrific! I loved that show!!
    Great list and honourable mentions !!

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    1. Thanks. 🙂
      Sebastian in Brideshead was such a tragic figure and Andrews played him so well. I have a diary entry in my old diaries of how blown away I was by that performance. Come to think of it, that might make a nice blog post some day… And yes, I also saw him in those Love Boat episodes! They ended sad for him too…
      Remington Steele I watched in the 1980s on German TV but only much later did I watch them again and enjoyed them then even more than I remembered.

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    1. Hmm, I never made that Hiddleston / Andrews comparison yet but I do get what you mean.
      Pierce is almost too good looking for this world. I didn’t start crushing on him till after Bond, I love his more mature looks.
      Which Pierce role was going to make your list?

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  3. Mezz

    Oooh, Daniel Rafferty! There’s that longer, run-your-fingers-through-it hair that makes him so rakishly attractive. Just like someone else we know ha! I love The Lake House as well.

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    1. Yes on the long hair, and that hint of grey and the reading glasses. So sexy!
      Yeah, The Lake House is cute movie and one of Keanu Reeves’s sexiest looks, imo.

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  4. Servetus

    I hadn’t thought about Michael Landon in a *long* while until I was building some 20th c. TV into my US history course and he showed up twice in the most iconic shows of the later twentieth century: Bonanza and Little House on the Prairie (also Highway to Heaven but I didn’t discuss that one). I think I had a bit of crush on Pa as a girl too, facilitated by having read the novels. LIW / Laura adored her father and I wanted to experience those feelings (even if I never felt that way about my father).

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    1. Yeah, I could really identify with that daddy adoration myself.
      Your history courses always sound interesting, Servetus! What was the point you were making with Michael Landon? Just curious.

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      1. Servetus

        well, since you asked (watch out for long explanation):

        I hadn’t initially planned to put much TV in the class, but then we all suddenly went online and I needed something that just would be easier / less stressful. I would have been making points about the general thrust of US politics from the 1950s through the Reagan Revolution, and I decided rather than having them read a bunch of stuff I could demonstrate that stuff with television shows. So we watched a bunch of shows that focused on families and showed gender relationships and touched on race relationships (which we also did more traditional work on): Leave it Beaver and I Love Lucy for the 50s; My Three Sons and Ozzie and Harriet for the 60s; All in the Family, The Jeffersons, and Good Times from the 70s; and Little House on the Prairie, The Cosby Show, Happy Days, and Roseanne for the 80s. This was also potential fodder for talking about American consumption habits: during WWII almost no one owns a TV and there are few broadcasts — by the mid-50s most families have one, and so the entire family watches together on one of the three commercial networks; and beginning in the 80s we have the entry of multiple TVs into most households, so that the move toward niche watching emerges when parents and kids no longer have to watch the same shows during “prime time.” Most Americans get pay tv / cable beginning in the 90s and from then on the question of “what Americans are watching” becomes a lot more complex (and this wasn’t a class on TV), so I stopped at that point.

        In general we can say that there’s a conservative cultural turn in a lot of US tv in the 80s — in a weird way because just as we’re seeing shows like Little House (and The Waltons — don’t know if you ever saw that but it was a huge fave) that portray the perfect family, there are plenty of dystopian / “decadent” soap operas — Dallas, Falconcrest, Dynasty, Knots Landing — that are also hugely popular. (Although they are shown after 8 so at least notionally kids were not watching them / families did not watch them together.) But shows like Little House, The Waltons, Eight is Enough and those that presented a nostalgic picture of families of the past (The Wonder Years, Happy Days) are seen by critics and historians as a reaction against the much more frank pictures of the family in 70s tv (All in the Family, Sanford and Son, etc.)

        I think the students were surprised by how amusing some of these shows were. I was a bit shocked by how much and how openly they use racial and social stereotypes, but I was surprised by how slow I found a lot of it. I Love Lucy seems really slow now, to me anyway. And something else I’d forgotten — the 50s TV sitcoms that filled a half hour slot were usually 26 or 27 minutes long. Nowadays a half hour sitcom is more like 22 minutes. It really makes a difference in how long a show seems. (The difference is eaten up by advertising).

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        1. Thank you!
          Sounds so interesting to study the tv shows from that standpoint – what they say about the times and the politics.
          Yes, I did watch The Waltons. John Boy looked like a boy in church I used to have a crush on. Hmm, I could have maybe included him in my fictional crush post as well.
          My parents used to love watching All in the Family and we’d watch with them. A lot of the older shows I only know by name. I don’t know Eight is Enough, though, and now want to look into that as I too come from a family with eight siblings. That’s also one of the reasons why we enjoyed the The Waltons: we could relate to the large family aspect of it.
          As for length of shows – when I re-watched Remington Steele I noticed that too. The episodes were 48-50 minutes long whereas now “one hour” shows are 41/42 minutes long.

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  6. You have great taste Esther! From a young age, I’ve always had a crush bubbling away on someone. RA has been the longest so far. Oh Michael Landon though! I loved the ‘Little House’ books and remember being incandescent with rage (I felt things deeply) that Pa didn’t have a big black beard in the TV series. It was my first disappointment with a book to film transition but Michael Landon soon won me over.

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    1. LOL! For me, it was the other way around. I first saw the tv series as a young kid and when I was around 10 I started reading the books. So, I was surprised to find Pa Ingalls had a beard! Also, some of the story was the same but the TV show also invented a lot. I was able to love them both, though, as separate but similar entities.

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      1. Servetus

        The TV show also reinserted some elements of the Ingalls family’s lives that had been left out of the children’s book series, notably the death of the little brother and the episode of hotelkeeping. I don’t know how into this you would want to get (or maybe you are already familiar with this stuff?) but there’s been an excellent study recently of what made it from Laura’s original manuscript memoir into the books and how the transformation occurred. It’s essentially an annotated edition of the manuscript:

        It recapitulates some points made in William Holtz’s “Ghost in the Little House,” but also moderates the extremity of his argument and just gives a lot more granular data. Pioneer Girl is just a fantastic book for the LIW fangirl. I also think Caroline Fraser’s recent book on this topic (Prairie Fires) is worth reading although Fraser’s hostile position on early 20th century libertarianism in the US clouds the picture a lot, I find (she’s very invested in the idea that Rose Wilder Lane and then in turn, Lane’s heir and literary executor, Roger McBride, distorted the original text in ways that were influential on US politics to our detriment. That RWL was a libertarian and that she edited / rewrote her mother’s memories from that perspective is unquestionable — I just don’t buy that they were all that influential on contemporary politics in the way she says. Pretty much every child in my generation in the US read those books — most of us are not libertarians and really almost every reader takes something different away from the books.) Where Fraser is strong is in her analysis of the role that the settlers’ wars with the Native Americans played in the formation of LIW’s thinking.

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        1. Ha, thanks, Serv! I can always count on you for in depth analysis. 😊
          I have heard of such studies and have read bits and pieces here and there in the past but have never actually really dug deeper. Maybe best to start with that Pioneer Girl book sometime? That sounds so familiar to me, maybe I already have it lying around somewhere. I’ll dig in my bookshelves…

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        2. OK, just checked my shelves, I do not have this book, but I do remember looking at it before online. I got a book voucher from my IL’s recently (belated bday gift) and I have just used it to order the book. Should be arriving tomorrow. 🙂

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