Actors pretend to be other people. It's what actors do. Sometimes they fail. Other times they succeed. And sometimes they embody their characters so completely that you forget you're watching a movie. Take some of the best biopics for example. Did you notice Helen Mirren while watching The Queen, or was it Elizabeth II you saw? What about Peter O'Toole in Lawrence of Arabia, or Daniel Day Lewis in Lincoln? Even now it's difficult to think of Ben Kingsley or Mahatma Gandhi without associating one with the other, because like all of the above, the actor didn't just play a role - they became that role.
