Artists can take their inspiration from almost anything. That could include painters, musicians, and actors. They can draw on personal experience, other artistic works that they have found moving, or maybe they just make it all up on the spot and hope for the best. Whatever the case may be, it’s always interesting to learn that sometimes the inspiration for a character or performance is something you never expected. 

10. Melissa McCarthy Based her Bridesmaids Character on Guy Fieri

The 2011 movie Bridesmaids was a pretty big hit and helped Kristen Wiig’s star to rise in her post SNL career. However, the breakout star of the movie was actually Melissa McCarthy. She has gone on to have a very prolific career in comedy since that time.

In the movie, McCarthy’s character is kind-hearted, but also a little brash and inappropriate at the best of times. She’s like a bull in a China shop and provides a lot of the movie’s most over the top comedy. 

McCarthy has said in interviews that her inspiration for the character was Guy Fieri, the Food Network chef known for his spiky, bleach blonde hair and boisterous personality. According to McCarthy, she actually wanted her character to have the same hair as Fieri but the producers shot her down because they felt it would be a little too obvious what they were doing. 

9. Dr. Evil Was Based on Lorne Michaels, Which Dana Carvey Claimed he Came Up With

When Austin Powers came out back in 1997, it was one of those cultural moments that overtook polite society. It happens once in a blue moon with a rare comedy that people just can’t get out of their heads. Ace Ventura did it, Anchorman did it, and Austin Powers was no different. And by that we mean people couldn’t stop quoting it.  Everyone had an Austin Powers impression, or a Dr. Evil one. For a solid year you couldn’t escape people yelling “Yeah, baby!” or “Oh, behave!”

It turns out that Dr Evil himself was an impression that Mike Myers was doing. The character was based on notorious Saturday Night Live head Lorne Michaels.If you ever listen to an interview with Lorne Michaels speaking and keep this in mind, you’ll never be able to not hear it from now on.

In a strange twist, Dana Carvey, who was Mike Myers co-star on SNL and in the Wayne’s World movies, came out to say that the impression was actually his. He claims to have done the impression back in the day as the first SNL cast member to make fun of Michaels, but Myers stole it from him to make the Dr. Evil character. 

8. Christian Bale was Inspired to Portray Patrick Bateman by Tom Cruise

It’s hard to say if this one qualifies as a compliment or not, but probably not. Christian Bale, who is maybe most famous for being Batman these days, is also known for his role as Patrick Bateman in the movie American Psycho.

The director Mary Harron and Christian Bale had been looking at Bateman as though he were a Martian. The idea was that he was viewing Humanity like it was something he didn’t understand, so Bale needed to make his character into something alien and inhuman that was trying its best to fit in.

According to Bateman, he saw Tom Cruise on David Letterman’s talk show one night and described him as having “a very intense friendliness with nothing behind the eyes.” So he used that as inspiration for his dark and disturbed performance.

7. Jabba the Hutt is Based on Actor Sydney Greenstreet

Few film series’ have more behind-the-scenes lore and drama than the Star Wars universe. You’d be hard-pressed to argue that any film series in history has more fanatical fans. Part of that is because there’s so many interesting and unexpected things to learn about them. Like how Jabba the Hutt, the intergalactic space slug crime boss from Return of the Jedi was actually based on real life actor Sydney Greenstreet.

Back in the day, Greenstreet was huge, literally and figuratively. At his peak he weighed 350 lbs and was described as an “urbane fat man” and one of cinema’s most classic villains. The team that designed Jabba the Hutt was reportedly told by George Lucas to make him Look “alien and grotesque” so they settled on Greenstreet.

6. Bram Stoker Based Dracula, in Part, on Walt Whitman

Odd sources of inspiration is not a new thing by any means. We merely have to look at Bram Stoker’s most famous character, Count Dracula, to see that. Most of us know Dracula from Stoker’s book and the dozens of movies that have featured the character. And, it’s generally known in a historical context that Dracula was based partially on Vlad the Impaler, the Romanian prince from the 1400s. Less well known is that Dracula was also inspired by the poet Walt Whitman.

Stoker was a massive fan of Whitman’s poetry. He kept up a correspondence with Whitman, and if you read his letters it’s clear that Stoker thought the world of the man. It has also been speculated that his feelings went beyond professional and were perhaps romantic, though the two never met so it was more of a parasocial relationship than anything else.

Elements of sensuality in Dracula have been attributed to Whitman’s influence and the physical description of the vampire matches the poet as well.

5. Chewbacca was Based on George Lucas’ Dog

Hollywood has immortalized many dogs over the years. From Lassie to Benji to Santa’s Little Helper, people like dogs in their stories as much as they like real dogs in their real lives. And why not?  It’s not unfair to say that a lot of dogs on screen have more personality than the humans who act alongside them sometimes.

George Lucas is clearly a man who loves dogs. In fact, his own dog has been the inspiration for two of Hollywood’s most iconic characters ever. Lucas used to have an Alaskan Malamute that he named Indiana. You may recall in the movie Indiana Jones in the Last Crusade, Jones is asked about his nickname and what it means. There’s a joke that Indiana was their dog’s name, and therefore Jones himself is named after a dog. That comes directly from George Lucas and his sidekick Indiana.

The real life dog dates back much earlier.  Lucas has said he used to drive around with the dog in the passenger seat and go everywhere with him. He had her as a pet while he was writing Star Wars, and because she was his co-pilot next to him, and she was a large shaggy dog, she became the inspiration for Chewbacca the Wookiee.

Actor Peter Mayhew would go on to study the movement and behavior of zoo animals to perfect the character and bring him to life as a sort of pet, sort of sidekick. 

4. Gary Oldman was Inspired by Ross Perot and Bugs Bunny for his Fifth Element Character

Gary Oldman has had some amazing roles in his career ranging from Dracula to Commissioner Gordon to an intergalactic supervillain/fashionista. That last one, Zorg from The Fifth Element, was a standout if for no other reason than he was visually bizarre and Oldman hammed up the character to match the aesthetic. So how does one of the greatest actors of a generation create the persona of a space dictator? To hear Oldman tell it, all he had to do was draw inspiration from two of the most disparate sources you could think of. He based Zorg on politician Ross Perot and also Bugs Bunny.

Despite being a despotic space villain, Zorg has an over the top southern drawl drawn straight from Ross Perot. And as far as Bugs go, if you can’t find his cadence or delivery in Oldman’s performance, which is a little more subtle, the teeth are there as well.

3. Nic Cage based Big Daddy on Adam West

You would be hard pressed to find an actor with a more eclectic and baffling career than Nic Cage. He’s gone from Academy Award-winning performances to straight to streaming movies that are complete head scratchers, and everything in between. No matter what Cage does, however, you can absolutely guarantee that he is going to give it 110%. No one throws themselves into a role like Nic Cage.

In the movie Kick-Ass, he had a supporting role as the character called Big Daddy. Big Daddy was an obvious homage to Batman, so it’s no wonder that Cage, who was a well-known comic book enthusiast, looked to the history of Batman for some inspiration. He has said that he drew on the original Batman, Adam West, to inspire that performance.

Adam West’s Batman was already kitschy, and when mixed with Nic Cage’s brand of acting, the character came out very over the top and a lot of fun. Cage revealed he met West after the movie and asked him if he knew he had been channeling West’s performance to create the character. According to Cage, West replies that he saw him try to channel him.

2. Fonzie from Happy Days is Based on Sylvester Stallone

Henry Winkler first appeared on TV as Arthur Fonzerelli back in 1974. The character is still fairly well-known today even by younger generations, thanks to the Jumping the Shark meme if nothing else. For an entire generation and then some, the Fonz represented what it meant to be cool. So how did Winkler come up with the character? Thank Sylvester Stallone.

Winkler had made the movie Lords of Flatbush back in 1974 which also starred Stallone. When he was looking to channel coolness for his Fonzie character, he just put himself in the Stallone headspace. He’s even demonstrated in interviews how he would start subtly changing his voice to sound more and more like Sylvester Stallone, and then just guess what he thought Stallone would do in any situation.

1. Seth Green Based his Family Guy Character Voice on Buffalo Bill 

Animated series Family Guy has been on TV since 1999. That’s a heck of a long run for any show and speaks to the appeal and endurance of the comedy. Several of the voices of the characters are provided by series creator Seth MacFarlane, this includes Peter Griffin, Stewie, and Brian the Dog. Chris Griffin is voiced by actor Seth Green, and he took his inspiration from a very off-putting source.

In interviews, Green has explained that he auditioned for the role using a basic sort of surfer guy voice. But then he tried it again with something that he had made up with a friend. It was his impression of the Buffalo Bill character from the movie Silence of the Lambs, only a little higher pitch to make him sound younger. 

He and a friend had developed the voice as a joke, when they were wondering what kind of personal life the character might have outside of the confines of his creepy serial killer life. With his voice and mannerisms, the joke was that he had to be awkward and weird all the time. They made jokes about how he would deal with other real life situations like a drive thru and that gave birth to the Chris Griffin character. In so many words, Chris Griffin is supposed to sound like a serial killer who removes people’s skin.

Every culture in history has created its own bestiary of otherworldly and mythical creatures. And the deeper you get into mythology, the weirder the monsters are. From the giant to the tiny, the ethereal to the subterranean, the sagely to the fiendish, if you can imagine it, it most likely exists in lore. Except we have good reason to believe that people didn’t imagine them—at least not entirely. Many myths and cryptids have their basis in real-world animals, natural phenomena, and even other people. Here are ten such mythical creatures that mix unreality with at least a touch of reality.

10 Unicorns Are Wooly Rhinos

Unicorns are one of the most famous mythical animals; somehow, every two-year-old can name the magical, horned equines. They’ve also been around in various tales for 4,000 years across parts of Europe and Asia. One of the earliest examples of unicorns comes from the Greek historian Ctesias, who wrote of unicorns as animals native to Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Maybe it’s not a coincidence, then, that actual unicorns used to exist—in Eastern Europe and the Middle East.

Elasmotherium was an ancient genus of rhino whose most notable features were its shaggy covering of hair and its one long horn jutting straight out of its forehead. Further, compared to modern rhinos, its legs were longer and its teeth more horse-like. Early people who came across its skeleton, possibly well-preserved from its then-frigid habitat, would be perfectly logical in assuming that they had just found the remains of a horned horse, a unicorn.

9 The Hydra Was a Mutant Snake

Snakes and related reptiles like lizards and turtles are sometimes born with a condition known as polycephaly, which, as its name suggests, means having more than one head. Though almost any organism with a head can be born with the disorder, it is more common in snakes. It is even more common in warmer environments, like, for example, the Mediterranean heat of Greece.

If an ancient Greek were to find one of these multi-headed snakes, all it would take is a flair for the dramatic for that odd-looking reptile to become the terrifying Hydra. Were the Greeks known for their drama? Say, where does the word drama come from, anyhow?

8 Vampires Are Scientific Ignorance

Vampires are tricky myths because, unlike the simple horse-with-a-horn unicorns, vampires have a slew of different abilities, both natural and seemingly supernatural. It would seem hard to anchor them in real beings and phenomena. However, most of the vampire’s key traits are easily explained, almost always by medieval European ignorance.

Undeath? Coffins were exhumed with scratch marks on the inside lid for hundreds of years due to premature burial. Gauntness and fangs? Decomposition thins the body and recedes the gums, jutting the teeth out more than living sets. Aversion to sunlight? There are dozens of disorders that cause the symptom, like lupus, albinism, photophobia, and even concussions. Hyper aggression, hypersexuality, and association with wolves and bats? Rabies ticks a lot of vampiric boxes, which leads to the next point, namely that…

7 Werewolves Are Scientific Ignorance Too

Werewolves have become intrinsically linked with vampires in modern mythology, but the two have even deeper connections due to their overlapping origins.

Like vampires, rabies is a common theory for the animalistic behavior associated with werewolves and could actually come from a wolf bite. Porphyria is another common suggestion, as it often leads to aggression, aversion to light (even nocturnality), and even the combination of receding gums and reddened teeth—which together could look a lot like fangs. Then there is the condition known as werewolf syndrome, hypertrichosis, which causes hair to cover most of the body. As improbable as it would be for the two to cooccur, a person born with hypertrichosis who contracted rabies would be the spitting (and foaming) image of a werewolf.

6 Sirens and Mermaids Are Manatees

We’ve established that people in the middle ages were liable to misinterpret what they didn’t understand. But imagine how much worse these people would be after months at sea—hungry, thirsty, and particularly starved of the, ahem, opposite sex. That’s a big reason why modern mermaid myths exist.

Manatees, dugongs, seals, and sea lions are all near to a person’s size and all terminate in a large, broad, sideways-spanning tail. A sighting of one descending into the water with only tail raised would be an easy misinterpretation. It’s especially interesting that mermaids, despite being considered half-fish, seem to always be depicted with the same sideways-spanning tail that only aquatic mammals have.

5 Sea Serpents Are Giant Oarfish

The giant oarfish is terrifying—I mean, the longest bony fish in the world confirmed to reach 26 feet and reported to reach twice that amount. Its long, sinewy body is topped with an equally long webbed fin, and from its snakelike head dangle whisker-like tendrils. All of these are features of the generic sea serpent, and thus the connection is clear.

The earliest descriptions of sea serpents, often called sea worms, consistently include manes or fins on their heads and neck, just like the oarfish. Though oarfish are known to spend most of their time in the deep pelagic zone of the ocean, they make occasional sojourns up to the surface. Catching sight of their unparalleled length, with fin cresting the surface and chin tendrils trailing behind them, even today, might make anyone think for a second: sea monster.

4 Chupacabras Just Have Mites

Chupacabras, the goat-suckers of Mexican folklore, are fairly unique among modern cryptids in that supposed carcasses of the beasts turn up repeatedly. Unlike Loch Ness or the Mothman, supposed Chupacabras are available for study and inevitable debunking regularly. That’s why the real basis for Chupacabra sightings is pretty much set in stone: coyotes with mange and scabies.

Nearly every body turned in has been the same—a coyote or coywolf with a severe reaction to the mite Sarcoptes scabiei, common and relatively non-threatening to humans but rare and dangerous to coyotes. The mites cause mange and scabies, causing the coyotes’ hair to fall out, their skin to shrivel, and another interesting symptom. Mange debilitates the animal with fatigue and pain, forcing it to seek out easier prey, which often means livestock. Goatsucker, indeed.

3 Kappas Are Giant Salamanders

Kappas are river-dwelling imps from Japanese folklore. You may also know them from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III, which contains the dazzling dialogue from Michelangelo: “Kappa? Cappuccino?!” They are said to be the size of a dog or child. They’re dark, slimy, with webbed hands and feet, broad heads, and broad, almost turtle-like backs. Of course, this describes another creature that also makes its home in the rivers and ponds of Japan: the Japanese giant salamander.

The Japanese giant salamander takes the cake as one of the largest amphibians in the world, growing to more than five feet long and 60 pounds. It is truly an off-putting and startling sight for anyone. The vast majority of all amphibians in the world are restricted to under a foot in length. People believe that ancient Japanese fishermen and farmers would encounter the beasts rarely and misinterpret them as river demons, and I don’t blame them.

2 Cyclops Are Mammoths

The cyclops is one of Greek mythology’s most famous creatures, featuring prominently in its own chapter of the Odyssey. They are giants with the curious (and evolutionarily nonsensical) trait of having only one large, central eye. Though no living animal in the time of antiquity was likely to inspire the cyclops, one dead one very likely did.

Mammoths and mastodons, the extinct (for now…) relatives of elephants, were at one point ubiquitous. Though we tend to think of mammoths and mastodons as dwellers of the frozen north, the various species’ combined range includes just about the entire world, minus the most southern areas. And though we know them to have the two, sideways-facing eyes common to herbivores, their skulls have one large, central hole in the center front. It is a connection for the trunk, but anyone except modern biologists would see it and assume it was the socket of a large, lone, central eye.

And to ancient peoples with no knowledge of paleontology, the rest of the skeleton, almost certainly not fully articulated (because that’s very rare, despite what Jurassic Park claims), would be easily arranged to look like a giant, powerful, thick humanoid.

1 Bigfoot is Gigantopithecus 

Bigfoot, along with his numerous counterparts across the globe, is perhaps the most famous cryptid today. It, and we should really say they, are the poster children for cryptozoology groups and paranormal researchers. They’ve captured the hearts of millions, and part of the appeal is the credibility of their existence. Sure, most people don’t truly believe they exist but ask any primatologist (including myself, a former one), and they’ll give you a dozen reasons why they absolutely could. One of those reasons is that bigfoots truly did exist at one point not too long ago.

Gigantopithecus was an ape that went extinct around 300,000 years ago (or did it…), surviving well into the period in which it would have interacted with local humans. It is only known from jaw and teeth fragments, making size estimates imperfect, but it was, in any case, huge. Height estimates range from eight to twelve feet tall and weight estimates range from 600 to 1,200 pounds—150% to 300% the size of a silverback gorilla.

A likely member of the Ponginae subfamily alongside orangutans, it would likely have looked like a giant, thick, hairy ape-man. As it stomped through the forest, our ancestors truly did see their own bigfoot. If it, or a close relative, survived to modern times in the vast, unexplored forests of the world, perhaps the bigfoot myth is the bigfoot fact.