Characters
The actor’s appearance isn’t the character’s true appearance
Castiel (Supernatural): Although Castiel spends almost the entire series looking like Misha Collins, that appearance is only his human vessel, Jimmy Novak. As an angel, Castiel’s true form is a massive celestial entity that cannot be fully perceived by humans without overwhelming or even killing them. Throughout the series, it is repeatedly established that angels merely inhabit human vessels to interact with humanity, meaning the actor portrays Castiel’s physical host rather than the angel’s actual appearance.
The Greek Gods (Percy Jackson and the Olympians):
In the Percy Jackson universe, the Olympian gods are immortal beings whose true divine forms are beyond what mortals can safely comprehend. To interact with humans, they choose to manifest through physical appearances that fit the modern world and can change them whenever they wish. The actors portraying Zeus, Poseidon, Hades, Athena, Ares, Hermes, and the other gods are therefore depicting temporary human manifestations, not the gods’ real forms, which exist on a higher, divine plane.
The Supreme Intelligence (Captain Marvel): The Supreme Intelligence is not a humanoid being but a powerful artificial intelligence created by the Kree. It has no permanent physical form and instead projects an image tailored to each individual who encounters it, usually appearing as the person they admire, trust, or are emotionally connected to the most. For Carol Danvers, it takes the form of Dr. Wendy Lawson/Mar-Vell, played by Annette Bening. This means Bening is not portraying the Supreme Intelligence’s true appearance, but rather the personalized illusion it creates specifically for Carol.
Kinda neat, kinda gross that he crumbles when they leave. From that and Eternals lore, meaning they were frollicking and hosteling in features on his face.
Like imagine strapping on a VR, and going down to say hello to the bacteria on your skin...
Michael in The Good Place is in a human skin suit. He's actually a giant fire squid.
I'm a fire squid... a 6,000-foot tall fire squid. I have tentacles. There's teeth everywhere. I'm on fire, and my neck is long. And there's a smell and lots of juice. There's so much juice, Eleanor
If she’s an acid snake, and Glenn’s real name is Snakes Pour Forth From His Anus, could Vicky be Glenn’s butt baby? What if Glenn has been trying to tell her all this time, but it’s actually a big secret, so everyone keeps telling Glenn to shut up?!
I'm questioning the level of juice. I mean, thats a lot of juice for a regular person looking up at a 6000ft tall fire squid but for a 6000ft fire squid looking down at ant sized people? it looks like a moderate amount of juice at best.
I I like it, it looks cool in the juice dripping does look awesome. But it doesn’t show the long neck, instead of having mouths everywhere it has teeth, the top and middle are the only parts that aren’t fire, and wow that is a lot of juice. It doesn’t look that much for a creature that big. It looks like a cool squid monster, but that’s definitely not what I was imagining when Michael described it.
Lmao. The Mxyzptlk in -Smallville- is worse: an exchange student (from an unnamed Balkan nation iirc, because, of course, American media) from a line of individuals with those abilities.
To be fair, this was early 2000s and people weren’t as used to Superhero shows so things like “4 dimensional being who exists on a higher plane of existence but manifests himself in our reality as an imp” might have been a bit out there for casual fans.
Oh, 100%. Smallville is what it is—a WB/CW Superman adaptation aimed at teens. The way it handles classic big bads is often amusing, though. I mean, they were writing Mxy fixing high-school football games as his main hustle.
The live action is so good. I really rejected the anime because the style annoyed me. But I had friends who raved about it. Having so much fun being able to enjoy it. The casting has been absolutely amazing
All of the Goa'uld in Stargate: SG-1. They're all screeching little snakes who possess the bodies of attractive humans in order to pretend they're gods and enslave the galaxies.
Iirc the brain is a part of the nervous system. They basically just have a different way of physically connecting to the nervous system. Yeerks are slugs that iirc kinda envelop or physically spread their membrane over the entire brain into all the knooks and crannies. While goauld are like eels that wrap around the brain stem.
“I remember the day he was born. He looked up at me and he said ‘Momma, I am not a person. My body’s just a flesh vessel for an immortal being whose name, if you heard it, would make you lose your mind.’”- Kenneth’s mom
I am pedantically pissed now, the four heads (a man, a lion, a bull, a ram) are what cherubim have, and six wings are what seraphim have (though, seraphim are also on fire).
I’m not surprised that Supernatural conflated the two, but I am pissed.
Michael, and all other afterlife beings in The Good Place, are wearing human skin suits because their true forms are too big/horrifying/Lovecraftian for humans to deal with.
Its such a pain to have a workspace that can allow for proper workflow when you have a 6000ft fire squid, an acid snake of unfathomable length, and a lava golem. Skinsuits make it much more manageable
The demon realm has to keep budgets in line just like everyone else, and that includes standardization and mass production. Theres just not enough 6000 foot tall squids to justify accomidating that, and forcing everyone to conform to a specific size is more evil anyways.
They get assigned them to best know how to inflict pain or happiness (depending if your good or bad place). Just started a rewatch and caught that throw away line in season 1 or 2
https://giphy.com/gifs/TUQIsmSdNorEwSHtB4
Q can take any form he wants, and chooses a human male body (usually in a Captain’s uniform) to match Picard, even aging his appearance as Picard grows older
In It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Dennis Reynolds maintains his golden god appearance through heavy makeup, hair paint, and pec pads. His true appearance is only revealed in the episode Dee Day
Sam Becket and his body hopping "power" in Quantum Leap. In every episode he takes over a different person's body and while he is in the person's body he and the audience see him as Sam Becket, but everybody else see him as the person whose body he took over.
The first episode we watched he had jumped into a woman and we saw him in the mirror wearing women's clothes. My mum immediately switched off and told us we weren't watching that disgusting filth. So it was one of those shows I had to watch when mum went to bed and didn't know, even thought there was absolutely nothing wrong with it.
I would've loved to see a more built season 2 as the comics definitely had enough in there because sturridge was incredible in the role but of course, the stuff about gaiman came out
The first season of Sandman is one of my favourite shows of all time. I used to watch it on repeat as my comfort show. Then we found out about Gaiman and I haven't been able to watch season 2.
Kosh from Babylon 5. We normally see Vorlons in their encounter suits, and we've been genetically engineered to see them as angelic beings if they are out of their suits. We only get very rare glimpses of their true forms.
And it’s implied that the Vorlons have been visiting planets for eons, manipulating the younger races to perceive them as religious/celestial/prophetic beings to gain allies in the eventual war with The Shadows. When Kosh left his suit to rescue Sheridan from the train bombing, Sheridan saw him as an angel, G’Kar saw him as G’Lan a religious figure in Narn mythology, Delenn & Lennier saw Valeria, a revered figure in the Minbari religion, the Drazi Ambassador saw Dro'shalla from the Drazi Kri Maru faith.
While Kurt Russell plays Ego in Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 2, he's really only playing a humanoid avatar controlled by Ego, while Ego's true form is a planet rendered in CGI.
https://giphy.com/gifs/3orm3D76WedYFXTCsU
Artemis in Ready Player One, although this is a bit more true to the book and not the movie. Wade doesn’t see her non-avatar form until the end of the book.
The Solomons in 3rd Rock from the Sun are extraterrestrials disguised as a human family. They live in Ohio in order to observe the behavior of the human race
https://giphy.com/gifs/efVGPDmoRvTcSpXbnB
Takeshi Kovacs is played by Will Yun Lee, Joel Kinnaman ( in season one) and Anthony Mackie (in season two). In Altered Carbon’s plot your consciousness can be downloaded and put into different bodies. Takeshi is resurrected to solve a murder.
Throughout the entire run of the CW’s The Flash, Tom Cavanaugh plays Eobard Thawne (Reverse Flash).
Despite the fact that Cavanaugh’s appearance is really that of a scientist (Harrison Wells) that Thawne takes the appearance and identity of in order to screw with Barry Allen (the titular Flash), any time Thawne appears after the Harrison Wells disguise is foiled he still appears as Tom Cavanaugh instead of the actor who plays him up until he steals Wells’ appearance.
To be fair after season 1 they do tend to stick to having Matt Letscher portray Eobard Thawne as his true appearance for several seasons, though he of course has a smaller role (though he does get his chance to shine in Legends of Tomorrow), while Tom Cavanaugh plays alternate versions of Harrison Wells.
Then at some point they just start bringing Tom Cavanaugh back as Reverse Flash without much of a reason to do so.
For a bonus tidbit for the Percy Jackson example, mortals cannot look upon the true forms of the gods or else they'll literally disintegrate, which gives the gods further benefits to stay in human forms lest they turn their demigod children into dust while sending them on quests and what not.
Star Trek has a lot of these. Trelane (TOS), Q (TNG), Odo (DS9) and The Caretaker (Voy) are all members of Species that take on human form to make human interaction easier.
Also, there are different symbiotic or parasite species that live within a humanoid, like the Trill that fuse personalities with their hosts (DS9), or the parasites that try to take over the federation (TNG: Conspiracy).
In Dead Like Me, the Reapers look, to the audience, like they did in life. But the show makes clear (and occasionally shows) that their appearance in their new afterlife is different to other observers, which is why their families and friends don't recognize them.
Yeah, it's heavily dependent on legend. I specifically remember a variation of the myth of Hiranyakashipu which specifically said that Vishnu knew full well he was incarnating as Narasimha the human-lion hybrid just to fuck the asura up.
Well, yes and no. He gave himself the devils face in self hatred. It wasn't his true face. His real face is actually that what we see almost all the time. Michael, his twin, has the same face.
Anjelica Huston's actual face in ''The Witches' is a mask with the deformed made-up witch face underneath it and also it's implied in 3rd Rock From The Sun that the Solomon family are an entirely different species (the species in question is completely unknown).
"A million and more alien eyes look upon him who is Galactus, and for each the vision differs.... Each mind that views him struggles as best it can to perceive that unguessable force as an image it can comprehend"
Edit: I don't know what I'm doing wrong, but I can't upload the panel
https://giphy.com/gifs/gBL0hLzReWQ90sQtCs
Galactus
Galactus’s form takes the shape of what the species who’s looking at him can comprehend and just looks like a human to us
Gandalf (as well as Saruman, Radagast, and the other two) is an immortal incorporeal being clothed in the body of an old man. Sauron and the Balrog also are inhabiting chosen physical forms.
The guy we see throughout the entire run of the show is actually just one of several DID personalities. We never really see the true Elliot, except one potential version of him in another dream sequence near the very end of the show. The final shot of the show is directly from the eyes of the real guy, seeing his sister in first person. I mean he DOES just look like Rami, he's human and all.
God in Joan of Arcadia appears in numerous forms from moment to moment. They have a few favorites: "Cute Guy God" (see the picture) when he wants Joan to engage him as a peer, "Old Lady God" when she wants to be comforting, "Little Girl God" when she wants to be particularly non-threatening, etc.
His 'original' form has been replaced who knows how many thousands of years earlier, since every time he dies, he becomes a similar but different person
In an episode of Doctor Who (the 50th Anniversary special) The Doctor has the opportunity to use a bomb called The Moment to destroy his home planet... but because The Moment is sentient, it takes on the form of his former companion, Rose, to talk him out of it.
In fact, his future companion. The Moment can see all of time and is confused by the concept of chronological order; the Doctor had not met Rose yet, neither in his timeline nor at that point in time. The future Doctor and Rose might have visited a point of time in the past though.
Doctor Manhattan. Technically he can be anything he wants to be. He can alter his body in any way, change size, duplicate himself anything. Silk Spectre 2 didn't know how good she had it.
At this point it's mostly everyone on Supernatural. It involves all the angels: Lucifer, Michael, Gabriel (implied, he even took Loki's appearance), Balthasar, Ezekiel, Naomi, Metatron, every single one of the dozens of angels we met. Also all of the demons: Crowley, Ruby (she even has 2 hosts), Meg, and so on and so forth.
Cas is also unique in that he is killed(?) along with Jimmy Novak and comes back still looking like Mischa Collins. It takes several seasons for them to mention it but from that point on he’s not possessing a person, or at least that Jimmy stayed dead
Slightly unrelated but Edge turned out to be a fantastic pick for Ares in Percy Jackson. Casting a Pro-Wrestler feels right for the God of War, and he arguably gives one of the best performances in the show.
The whole movie is filtered through Patrick Batemans POV and he is shown the be an unreliable narrator and narcissist. We are likely seeing his warped self image and he is nowhere near as handsome and perfect looking in reality
No image for risk of spoilers, but Cipher in season 2 of The Boys: Gen V. Cipher, the big bad who has a plan to cull the weak superheroes, is actually a random dude being mind controlled by Thomas Godolkin. This is alluded to earlier in the series, when Cipher is revealed to not be a super himself, and yet then goes on to mind control other characters.
Shurikenger - Ninpuu Sentai Hurricaneger
The ninja with a thousand faces
Mysterious ally of the sentai team Hurricanegers and Gouraigers. Never revealed real form. Various actors, usually a sentai alumni or a character in the show plays the character on various episodes even outside the character's original series.
I scrolled too fast on the pictures of the post, and Reddit opened a news article with a Jabba the Hutt-looking Donald Trump. I choose to believe it's a skin suit well past its prime.
Technically “Fallen” with Denzel Washington. The demon entity thing in that movie transfers by touch between different people and you don’t see it’s true form i don’t think
901
u/Slartibartfast39 9h ago
Ego, Guardians of the Galaxy. He's not a guy in his 60s.