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Thursday, November 20, 2025

Is it weird to look up someone's height?

I often don't notice how tall actors are. When I was watching some Star Wars bonus features, they said that Dooku is 6 1/2 feet tall. Holy crud! Well, movies like to use tall people for villains. They can look more looming and dangerous that way (In Back to the Future, they chose a different villain because an earlier option wasn't as tall). 

Unfortunately, short guys are often not picked as a main hero. Not always, luckily. Though as I've mentioned, I'm unlikely to notice either way. Mostly because I don't really care how tall they are. 

For example, Matthew Broderick is known mostly for "Ferris Bueller's Day Off." But I mostly know him from Ladyhawke (and The Lion King, but you don't actually see him in that movie). In Ladyhawke, his character is called Philippe the Mouse. Everyone makes a big deal about how tiny he's supposed to be. It didn't occur to me for a while to wonder if the actor really was that small (They're sitting on a horse here, so it's hard to really tell). 


I also saw a video that teased Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe) for being short. He never struck me as short. Even looking at pictures, he's not that much shorter. 


All this is buildup to my actual point. 

When I was watching Spider-Man earlier this year, Tobey Maguire was standing next to another actor. 


The height difference struck me for the first time. Which got me wondering, Tobey Maguire he short, or is the other actor really tall? Or both. In Seabiscuit, Tobey Maguire plays a jockey. Jockeys are small, because that means the horse can run faster. But Red (the jockey he plays) was a very tall jockey. They even make fun of it in the movie. So I don't think I can judge by that (Why do I know so much about this? I read the Seabiscuit book, and I have the documentary, which is really good. I've watched it several times with my dad, who also loves it). 

I would have stopped there. But I wanted to draw one of the characters in a comic with other characters. So I needed to know his general height. 

Now, this may seem like a random aside, but it will work its way back in. In manga, they'll often slip in character bios. These bios generally have a picture, the character's likes and dislikes, foods they enjoy, their age, and blood type (I never understood why the blood type was in there). One of the factors is height. 


I suddenly wondered if wikipedia did that for actors. I really hoped it didn't - that would be weird. I usually only check out an actor's wikipedia page to see what movies they were in. Maybe they really did have personal stuff like that. I waffled around for a while, not wanting to look it up. But finally I caved. And I was rather relieved to find that wikipedia didn't list the actor's height. 

Except I'll still need to figure out how tall to draw the character... Is it weird that I feel really strange doing an internet search about that? 

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