Dr. Wright... Inspirations

As I dosed off to sleep last night with thoughts of my previous post and today's upcoming post mulling away, I gave some thought to exactly who is Dr. Wright? Take a deep breath, it's a long one...

As has been already established, our Doctor is a highly learned and aldulterous man. The storyboards from the past couple of weeks [a few coloured ones of those coming up, by the way] have enabled me to further build up this character through his varied facial contortions, but hey, they don't come out of thin air.

I thought to myself about some characters from film and television who could bear resemblance to Dr. Wright in various terms [see below] which could help to inform the development of his character.

First up, everyone's familiar with him, it's Basil Fawlty:


Then, perhaps less familiar, Bill Murray as famous film actor Bob Harris in Sophia Coppola's Lost in Translation (2003):


And finally, one whom I am not even terribly familiar with, Dr. Alan Statham from Channel 4's Green Wing (2004):


Now, I don't want to go into deep, profound character analysis and deconstruction here, I've merely listed these characters as; A. I find them each uniquely funny, B. They roughly match the age of Dr. Wright, and C. They all share frayed and amusing relationships with women or their spouses.

Looking over my boards/script, Dr. Wright can be seen as someone with a short fuse and something of a split personality:

• At the begining he is grumpy and at the end of his tether with life and marriage.
  
• Then, he recieves a message from Nancy, freshly invigorated.
  
• This is followed by mesmerisation with her stunning beauty, throwing any notion of his intellect out of the window to become a gawping neanderthal.
  
• Finally, in the third act, post scary-drugging, he is a broken shell of a man, now prepared to be humble towards his wife through guilt and remorse.

By breaking his 'modes' down this way, it can be better seen how he resembles each of the afformentioned characters:

• His 'Act 1-self' - the grumpy/mid-life crisis-y one resembles Bob Harris, who is also sick and tired of his wife, ultimately finding he is happy to be away from her in another country, if only for a little while.
• The 'End-of-act 1 into-act 2-self' is like Alan Statham, excitable, jumpy, and very horny - almost driven mad by it all.
  
• And finally, Basil Fawlty, who actually covers Dr. Wright in some capacity across the three acts. He resents Sybil greatly, driving him to undermine her and spite her at many a time [and always in vain, or ultimately to bite him back in the end]. He's got the short fuse as well, and when Sybil bares her teeth, or with the knowledge that she will rain destruction on Basil, he relents with his tail in between his legs ('Act 3-self', Dr. Wright).

So, there we have a very crude break down of some strong comedy characters. With these qualities in mind, I set to having a decisive bash at Dr. Wright's look. And the result... meh, I'm disliking it with each repeated viewing, in all honesty...

I feel as though I have been struggling with Dr. Wright's look from day one - when I put pencil to paper, something very generic typically results after a couple of minutes. The result below I still feel is somewhat generic and is far from final, but I feel it is a step in the right direction, afformentioned thoughts considered.