Photo: Stephen Vaughn
Why is it okay to play around with Lincoln? Is it the beard? The hat? The fact that he posed for all those pennies …?
This is the man who not only freed an entire group of horribly enslaved human beings, but he kept our country united through bloody adversity. Doesn’t he deserve some respect?
Walker says Lincoln is ripe for spoof precisely because he is so universally beloved. “His legacy is safe. It’s something we all agree on and we’re all proud of as Americans,” the actor says. “Once you know that, nobody’s going to actually get hurt. We all do idolize him. We do look for qualities he exemplified and try to emulate that in our lives. Nobody gets their feelings hurt because we know who he was. If you throw vampires into the mix, it’s just another way to see someone we already think of as a hero be heroic.”
Plus, Lincoln was known to have a great sense of humor himself. “When he was a lawyer, going on the road, staying up late nights with legislators and businessmen in taverns, he was the life of the party; a very exciting and entertaining man in his own right,” Walker says. “I think he’d love our movie.”
Perhaps. But if Lincoln really did come back, he’d probably be saying “thanks, but no thanks” to theater tickets in general.
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