8 Movie Characters With Fascinating Backstories You Didn't Know About
6. Escape From New York - The President Has Interesting Parents
Escape From New York is the awesome cult movie that introduced the world to Snake Plissken, who is sent to New York prison to rescue the President. Since Carpenter isn’t big on giving his characters a backstory we don’t learn much about Snake, and we never find out why the President speaks with a British accent.
It turns out Donald Pleasence how a slight issue justifying this to himself too and decided to come up with his own biography. In his mind - since this version of the future was so bleak – that meant Margaret Thatcher had taken over the world, and the U.S. had reverted to being a colony again.
Pleasence went one step further and suggested his character was the lovechild of Thatcher and Reagan, which would explain why a Brit could become President. While Carpenter was amused with this explanation, he decided to leave this story thread out of the movie.