10 Weirdest Presidential Portrayals In Film

Reaching the position of President of the United States places those few people who have achieved the distinction in rarefied air. All told, there have only been 43 Presidents since the office came to be and each one is - perhaps barring George W. Bush - treated with some level of respect for having achieved their place in office.

At least that's how it's supposed to go. Films have a rich history of portraying various presidents in serious roles, either as the star of their own film or at least as a supporting figure in the serious telling of a larger story based in reality. Actors such as Daniel Day Lewis and Josh Brolin have all given somewhat serious portrayals of the men who have led the land of the free and home of the brave.

However, not all presidential portrayals are made equal. If your glance is turned away from the films that actually take their subject matter seriously then it is possible to find all sorts of films that have taken the most powerful person on the planet and made them an object of fun or used them as part of a fictional universe.

Here we look at some of the weirder portrayals of the Presidents of the United States in cinematic history.

The original Reefer Madness - released in 1936 - was a highly exaggerated take on the effects of marijuana that was essentially produced as a propaganda film to convince people to stay away from the drug. It is hilarious in its own right, so it's no surprise that it was eventually parodied years later.

The film was brought to the stage in 1998 as a musical, taking full advantage of the nonsense claims of the original to produce something so ridiculously weird that even the most stoned of individuals would struggle to come up with something odder.

The musical featured a portrayal of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who would be played by Alan Cumming in the made-for-TV film version in 2005. Cumming plays a number of roles in the film - including the lecturer that can be seen in full song and dance mode in the clip above - with his turn as FDR essentially being used to grant a presidential pardon to a character named Jimmy, who was pressured into his first joint near the beginning, thus setting the events of the film in motion.