There are some actors who embody a role so well that it's hard to separate their performance from the character. I'd classify Alan Rickman's performance as Severus Snape as a great example, as he really did make the role in the book-to-screen adaptation of Harry Potter his own. The only other Snape performance that I'm used to is Jim Dale's voice for the character during his narration of the original U.S. audiobooks. Suffice to say, it's been an adjustment to hear a different voice behind the Potions Master, but after finishing up the full cast audio edition of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, I realized that Riz Ahmed's take on the character has really grown on me.
I guess I should start by saying that my feelings about Alan Rickman's Snape are kind of complicated. On one hand, Rickman is iconic, and I think he elevated the Harry Potter movies with his take on the deadpan, often grumpy professor, who Harry and his friends occasionally thought was up to no good. But on the other hand, as a major fan of the books, there were things about Rickman's Snape that were different from what I imagined about the character. Part of that could be due to Jim Dale's voice performance on the original U.S. audiobooks, but I think another part was the tone Snape takes in the book being different (to me, anyway) than Rickman's tone, which was dry and even funny at times. The point of bringing this up at all is to emphasize that Rickman has a very specific take on Snape -- a take I loved, for sure, but not an exact match for how I imagined him from the book.
