Realism? Getting the twit from ‘Friends’ to play the hard-as-iron Commanding Officer? The first 23 seconds of Band of Brothers blew any sense of believability and realism out the water purely on that casting choice alone.
According to Stephen E Ambrose, and therefore according to the men of Easy Company who knew him:
“Sobel…was fairly tall, slim in build, with a full head of black hair. His eyes were slits, his nose large and hooked. His face was long and his chin receded. He had been a clothing salesman and knew nothing of the out-of-doors. He was ungainly, uncoordinated, in no way athletic. His mannerisms were ‘funny’, he ‘talked different’. He exuded arrogance.
Running up Currahee, Sobel was at the head of the company, head bobbing, arms flapping…..with his big flat feet he ran like a duck in distress.
Sobel was a petty tyrant put into a position in which he had absolute power. There was a cruelty to the man. Sobel was the classic chickensh!t. He generated the maximum anxiety over matters of minimum significance.”
The producers of ‘Band of Brothers’ went to enormous trouble to accurately depict the men of Easy Company, including selecting actors who bore a strong physical resemblance to the men they were playing, and with so many of the veterans involved in the series it is difficult to believe that the producers would have been allowed to stray too far from the truth.
It is easy to dismiss the unsympathetic way Sobel is portrayed as a clumsy pantomime bad-guy (as is often done) but in this case it was probably as accurate as it is possible to be.
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