My Richard Armitage: An interpretation. Armitage meets “the media,” round one

Below follows the next piece of my chronological interpretation of what I know about Richard Armitage, which I draw from a reading of available sources and based on my own perspective. In contrast: the best conventional professional biography of Mr. Armitage available is this one at Richard Armitage Online. Previously: Preface (explains the series); Part I (Richard Armitage’s family background, childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, and early professional experiences and training); Part II (Armitage’s career from leaving LAMDA to being cast in North & South); and Part III (pondering Richard Armitage’s identity and personality in 2004).

A reminder that I’ve been drafting this for quite a while, and that I’m not fully aware of the content of a great deal of the 2012 publicity blitz for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. In this section, however, I am reading mostly chronologically or developmentally with contemporary surviving sources. It may be worth repeating something I said last time:

Up till this point, the would-be biographer works retrospectively … as most .. available data was either been gathered by other researchers working after Armitage’s explosive appearance in 2004, or was stated by Armitage or his interlocutors in later publicity. From this point in his biography, however, the author is able to take up and evaluate data that appeared contemporaneously to the events being examined. It’s important to note this difference in source foundation […].

Acknowledging this change in source reading requires me to point out another matter: the relative force of different kinds of data being used for analytical purposes. I think it’s important to distinguish between things that we know that Armitage said (for our purposes, the strongest evidence about how he wished to be seen, even if they weren’t always said with huge amounts of forethought), things that he is quoted as having said (somewhat weaker evidence, in that these articles get so many other things wrong that it’s hard to believe he was always quoted accurately in a literal sense, or even in context), and evaluations of Armitage by journalists observing him (weakest evidence for our purposes, in that we’re filtering the perception of the subject we’re interested through the lenses of someone we don’t know and whose interpretive position we can’t easily evaluate).

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VII. Early press defines the contours of the “Richard Armitage” role

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The thesis statement of this section is probably best expressed as:

Journalists are not necessarily our friends.

In looking over surviving sources from the period between the broadcast of North & South and the beginning publicity for The Golden Hour, this conclusion seems patently clear.

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What sources from late 2004-early 2005 say

[Left: also a “pose,” but one I prefer: “Together” Richard Armitage, taken by Rebecca Bradbury for Vivid Magazine in 2005. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com]

It’s impossible for me, having become a fan only in January 2010, to reconstruct the atmosphere of late 2004, or to understand fully the responses of fans at the time, not least because the initial sources for fan reaction — the BBC message board, and the Yahoo group that followed it — are, as far as I know, gone. (And — I admit — I’m reluctant to dig into the archives of communities to which I am mostly an outsider [to some extent, on purpose]; casual attempts to do interviews with the few fans of that early generation whom I “know” have been, with one exception, gently and politely declined. Which is fine.) The publicity material that emerged about Armitage around the initial broadcast of North & South hardly came in a flood — although I know some stuff must have disappeared, even if there were four times as much as has survived, it would be modest — and one suspects that given a paucity of material on Armitage personally, early fans must have formed much of their impression of him via reactions to and intense discussions of his performance as Mr. Thornton. Whatever the early fan reaction, from my perspective as a historian working retrospectively with surviving sources that I can access, one matter strikes the reader clearly — the apparent disconnect between emphases in Richard Armitage’s initial messages to fans, and the picture of him that gradually emerged from the sort of press he would get once interviewers decided to ask sustained questions. In the end, of course, fans would choose to prioritize the image that best suited them and to discount other options that were equally on offer. This section of my interpretation of Richard Armitage explores how this process appears to work in surviving sources that preceded the opening publicity for The Golden Hour.

A brief taxonomy of available sources about Armitage up to the start of the publicity for The Golden Hour, his next major project, started, reflects the following genres:

First, in the run up to the broadcast, a handful of articles discussed North & South and each quoted Armitage once or twice; although he was the male lead, no one had heard of him, so he’s mostly included as an obligatory afterthought in these pieces, which quote Daniela Denby-Ashe and the show’s producers more heavily. His statements in these pieces, which I won’t discuss further, make him look like a professional actor commenting reliably on his role and tasks, but suggest little about his personality. Next, three journalists interviewed Armitage in the lead up to and during the broadcast; two of the three had little of substance to ask (and published their results in Q & A format), probably again because he was an unknown. Third, in the wake of fan response to North & South, a genre of articles sprang up that did not interview Armitage himself, but instead commented on the discussion board phenomenon and discussed him as a potential heartthrob. Fourth, appearing well after the initial broadcast, in conjunction with the publication of the North & South DVD, a subsequent genre includes the handful of pieces that interview Armitage at length, including three radio interviews. Finally, six messages from Armitage to fans are preserved from the period between the initial broadcast date of North & South and the end of 2005.

Q&As and Armitage’s own messages: Humorous and thankful

[Right: Fun on a “doom and gloom” set? Richard Armitage as Mr. Thornton films episode 3 of North & South. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com]

If we look at the first, brief materials apart from the articles that are more about North & South than about Armitage — by which I mean the Q & As [one and two] — the impression made is one of energy, fairly blunt self-evaluation, a bit of flirtatiousness, and a lot of humor, enthusiasm and a certain flippancy (that for me, as an outsider, overlaps or intersects with something I understand as a typically British insistence on not taking anything too seriously). Of course, the questions being asked by the interviewers are mostly inherently trivial or can only be answered with variations of irony — pretending to take a silly question seriously, providing a silly answer to a question that can’t be taken seriously despite its apparent weightiness, and so on. Sample these statements from the Q & As:

• “I researched cotton milling and the industry but I didn’t need to research the kicking. Did you like that?”
• “they decided to use me, which was brave. […] I’m a bit of a risk because I’m not particularly well-known. It’s a big role, the role of a lifetime […].”
• [When asked whether there’s life on other planets]: “If there is, it’s either very shy or hacked off with us. I’d like to think it is out there; it would be useful to compare notes.”
• [When asked about the secret to a good smolder]: “A pint of petrol and a match. Seriously, you look at the person, think of them in the most desirable way you can and then suppress the desire to do anything about it. There are many ways to smoulder. You can smoulder with your back.”
• [When asked whether he believes that love is forever]: “I’m counting on it. But, as yet, I cannot confirm it one way or the other.”
• [on the actor’s life]: “When you watch a performance back, you’re never happy, but you’ve got to be able to find some contentment with what you’ve done, or you wouldn’t be able to go on.”
• [settling the dilemma between bustles and bodices]: “Definitely bodices. They are restraining garments and there is something waiting to burst out. Bustles look like deformed backsides. They are not sexy.”

Setting aside comments about the role of Mr. Thornton and acting, when examining Armitage’s personality, although “sweet” and “sincere” are elements present in these pieces (“I think that spelling’s important. I try to write hand-written letters to my close friends, and I really appreciate receiving letters where the words have been carefully chosen”), they don’t predominate. Rather, humor and energy do. Of course, the genre of the Q & A demands that the interviewee attempt to be funny and energetic, as well, but confronted with that requirement, Armitage certainly succeeded and apparently without too much effort.

[Left: Hitting the alliteration hard: Radio Times publicity for the North & South broadcast. Source: Richard Armitage Online]

In the single longer surviving interview from late in 2004, which seems to have appeared primarily in regional as opposed to national publications, the interviewer confirms the impression of him as funny and energetic to some extent by writing of him, “His speech is peppered with jokes and little asides. He seems to enjoy being interviewed but it is a relatively new experience.” I include this note here primarily because it confirms the body of evidence available from this period, but remind readers that it is an editorial comment from the journalist. Like this piece, the remainder of the press from this initial period comments on Armitage’s “new heartthrob” status, but curiously does not quote him. This state of affairs tends to suggest either that the authors of the “sex symbol” pieces that appeared in the higher circulation venues [here and here] didn’t think about trying to interview Armitage, or possibly that if they called him to ask for a response to his new “sexy” status, he refused comment.

The predominant impression of energy and a strong sense of humor left by the early Q & As is augmented by Richard Armitage’s initial messages to fans, which, however, add the facet of strong gratitude to the picture. To see how this combination plays out, let’s parse Message #1:

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First, the message starts, middles, and ends with thanks. So, the first impression I get as a reader is of an author who wishes to express a feeling of being dumbfounded by a large, unexpected gift that alternately amazes, flatters, and humbles him. The text, read at face value, suggests that he also wants to communicate gratitude to his coworkers and share the love (meeting Daniela Denby-Ashe for a casual dinner; pointing out that his fellow actors — “we were all” — worked on creating the impression viewers received; citing the presence of a fellow North & South actor whom readers might remember in a future project). Finally, the message suggests that the author wants to give something back in exchange for fan commitment — information on future projects.

The second dominant impression from the message — one that intensifies the reader’s impression of gratitude — is the energy and enthusiasm with which it is delivered. Armitage makes slight fun of the “doom and gloom” aspects of North & South; remarks that the cast had laughed while making it anyway, notes the existence of a hidden catalog of outtakes (has any fan ever seen it, I wonder?), and comments about the funny costumes in “Malice Aforethought” and that he had escaped wearing them.

[Right: more fun on the North & South set: Daniela Denby-Ashe, Richard Armitage, and Jo Joyner. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com]

Finally, the implicit piece that ties the whole message together and makes it such a pleasure to read is the notion that somehow the author and viewers (I won’t yet call them fans) are involved a shared project, together. This mood is encapsulated in one sentence: “It was such a huge pleasure to make and I am thrilled that it has given you pleasure to watch.” I admit that I think that this is a statement of a central facet of Armitage’s fundamental ethos as an artist — looking for pieces that both please him to work on and which an audience will enjoy in return — but even if were not, that sentiment permeates this message, which stresses cooperation between the actors and ways in which the audience was connected to the actors via its appreciation of all the tiny little (“subliminal,” “secret”) details. Taken together with the statement about keeping viewers alert to Armitage’s new work, it’s a sentence that suggests the possibility of an ongoing relationship. I’d have fallen over with joy had I been among the viewers who had seen the original broadcast of North & South and then read this in 2004.

Rereading the publicity about Richard Armitage chronologically in light of my previous observations about the facets of his personality, it’s always interesting to note which facets come to the fore at any given point; as already observed, for example, the North & South DVD interview includes the elements of artistry, boyishness, and apparent sincerity, but leaves out the “smolder” or anything that points very forcefully or explicitly at anything rougher in Armitage’s personality than the possibility that he enjoyed his memories of kissing Daniela Denby-Ashe while filming the final scene. The personal messages also stress the intensity of his surprise and an energetic, boyish delight, but add the element of modesty and gratitude. These themes are enhanced in his second message to fans of February 24, 2005, on the occasion of the prospective closing of the BBC message board, where he ridicules himself gently (“I am actually Brad Pitt in the flesh!!??”) but spends most of his time thanking fans for making North & South a success through their contributions to the board and characterizes the experience as “an incredible adventure.”

Armitage emerges in the UK press: The serious, shy sex symbol

[Left: Leftover photos from Cold Feet embellished the North & South press that compared Richard Armitage with Colin Firth, as here in the Daily Record of December 7, 2004. Source: Richard Armitage Online]

But one matter that neither of those two genres of source pushes is an element of Armitage’s character that would come to play a central role in the way that many fans read his statements — his alleged shyness. This piece was added to his image at this point, and it seems to have been added primarily by print (as opposed to radio) journalists. For sources to substantiate this personality thread, we have to look at the longer interviews from the beginning of 2005, most of which appeared in conjunction with the release of the North & South DVD in the spring of that year. The Q & As, the personal messages, and even the “In a taxi with…” interview done with the Mail on Sunday (April 27, 2005), emphasize Armitage’s humor, human foibles and even a bit of savoir faire (the Mail on Sunday has him drinking a glass of wine to calm himself before the North & South audition, but also hanging out in West End “media haunts”). He seems happy and ready to talk. Though he comes across as gentle and occasionally sweet in his own interview on the North & South DVD, he doesn’t seem to be unduly reserved or frightened. The radio interviews [here (one and two) and here and here] have him speaking at length both jovially and informationally about the production, joking easily and lightly with his interlocutors — with no sign of shyness or reticence to discuss anything at all — and speaking appreciatively about fan appreciation of his work and the sudden expansion of popular interest in his career. But the print interviews take a different direction at this point and would continue to do so.

[Right: Richard Armitage in a photo from the shoot for this interview, which created an initially decisive, but oversimplified, strand in the “Richard Armitage” persona. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com. Don’t miss Guylty’s discussion of the technical errors in these photos here.]

In these pieces, a curious effect occurs. Armitage is suddenly much less funny or energetic than he has been up till now. Part of this effect occurs because the longer interview is inherently a more “serious” genre — its readers expect more substantial material, and the interviewee has more time to contemplate his answers. We can’t hear him speaking. Also, because such articles offer a report on an interaction to the reader, rather than occurring in front of him or her, as a radio or video interview does, the interviewer can probe a non-committal interviewee more easily without making her/himself look mean. Finally, the interviewer may also take the opportunity to editorialize ad libitum. So, in these pieces, although similar questions are asked about Armitage’s reaction to his sudden minor fame, his interlocutors are free to add their own reactions to what comes across in the radio interviews and messages as gratitude and cheery bonhomie. For whatever reason, these journalists added, to a greater or a lesser degree, a piece of the Armitage persona that would grow energetically in later pieces and become (at times problematically) decisive for fan understandings of the actor — turning him into a more-than-usually shy man, turning his boyishness into little-boyishness. The key perpetrator in this regard is the article, “In a swoon over me? Surely not,” published by Penny Wark in The Times of April 13, 2005.

Wark on Armitage

[Left: the interview in question, courtesy of Richard Armitage Online. Click to enlarge.]

A cursory glance over the Internet reveals that Wark is a widely published UK print journalist who seems to have made her career interviewing celebrities and discussing the social significance of everyday life issues, in particular medical issues and disabilities. I am about to tear this interview to shreds analytically, so I feel the need to note here that I am not charging Wark with malfeasance; I simply highlight the rhetorical strategies and effects at work in her piece. I can also imagine that Armitage was indeed much less polished than most of the people she regularly interviews. It draws on the earlier coverage that had focused on the message board responses to North & South, this time, however, going so far as to interview the actor. Given the beginning of the article, it seems that the question the journalist started the interview hoping to answer was whether Armitage the person was anything like the image of him and/or Mr. Thornton that the message board fans had created for themselves. The headline and the first three paragraphs concern fan reaction, and Wark notes that by doing the interview, she’s fulfilling the fantasies of thousands of women. Although the article is kindly written, then, the primary impulse it betrays, from the beginning, is one of mythbusting.

Wark begins with her own thoughts about female reactions to North & South on the message board, and then extrapolates to a question, “So RA, what does it feel like to be a sex god?” that she states she can’t ask “because even though we are newly acquainted I can see that he is a mild-mannered chap, and I don’t want to embarrass him. Asking what he thinks of the reaction to North & South seems kinder.” Note here that Armitage is saying nothing about himself: Wark has extrapolated from her interaction with him that he is a “mild-mannered chap” and that she needs to be “kinder” in addressing him. Why does she feel she needs to be kind to him? Armitage’s actual response to her ongoing remarks in the interview about his attraction to fans is actually quite level-headed, first noting that he, Armitage, and Mr. Thornton are different people, and then saying that if a fan saw him in a train station, she should make herself known. Wark, however, turns these quotes into a moment for infantilization, stating:

You will see that the lovely RA is naturally serious and modest, possibly because his career to date has involved infinitely more slog than recognition. If he is bewildered by the hyperbole that now surrounds him from afar, it is surely even more endearing to know that he seems never to have considered the transference of romantic fantasy from character to actor. Or at least not in relation to him …

The quotation then ends with a remark from Armitage about the frugality of his parents that has actually nothing to do with his self-concept (except insofar as it suggests that he admires his parents and / or their values). One suspects the heavy hand of a copy editor here pressed for space in the print edition; it’s hard to explain otherwise how a paragraph could be so disjointed.

Look at how Wark constructs that section of the article. The previous material quotes Armitage stating that fans should approach him, but nothing in the interview that Armitage says thus far actually suggests that he is bewildered. His statements are made in the same tone as the radio interviews — surprise and gratitude — but he’s hardly bewildered — and if he’s surprised, it’s because he didn’t of Thornton as the potential object of romantic attraction. The subordination in the second sentence in the quotation then leads the reader directly to a misleading conclusion (“If he is bewildered … it is surely even more endearing to know that he never seems to have considered the transference of romantic fantasy”). Actually the very statement that Wark quotes above proves that by the time of the interview, anyway, if not necessarily before, Armitage had thought about the potential transfer of identification from character to actor, and recognized it for what it was: a romantic fantasy. And, indeed, her conclusion points out that he knows that “his personal life and … the ministrations of the Armitage Army … are separate entities.”

[Right: More creased-shirt, barrel-distorted Armitage from 2005. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com. How anyone could have missed a look of amusement that borders on insolence is beyond me.]

So the dominant tone in which Armitage is painted in this interview is: serious but / and naïve. This view would be less troubling if it were not (a) in direct contrast to statements Armitage actually makes in the article; (b) anomalous with regard to the other press of the period, in which he hardly sounds or appears naïve or “bewildered” by fan attention — indeed, in some of it, he sounds very directly flattered, calling it “mad … but great”; and (c) ultimately facilitating of a certain kind of discourse about Armitage that would ultimately be problematic for him and us. Without having been there, it’s a bit hard to understand exactly what happened. One possibility is, of course, that Armitage was exactly as she described him — although reading through, it’s interesting the extent to which her characterization conflicts repeatedly with things that she quotes him as having said. It’s also possible that, proceeding on from her mythbusting impulse, Wark felt a need to make Armitage incapable of bearing all of these fan fantasies — and replaced the charismatic Mr. Thornton of fantasy with a version of the actor so sweet as to be saccharine, a perception the pedagogical tone that she takes with the reader (“You will see that”) certainly underlines.

Another possibility, one I find compelling, is “perception bleed” — that is, that Armitage’s reaction to one aspect of the interview ended up determining the entire shape of her portrait of him in the article. Going from the reasoning at the beginning about why she wanted to interview him in the first place (is he a worthy fantasy object?), and moving on from questions about how he felt about being the object of so much positive emotion, it seems that Wark spent a great deal of time querying Armitage about his romantic life. In an awkward paragraph that purports to be about his early training, Wark switches abruptly from a discussion of LAMDA back to the relationship issue, writing, “It was at LAMDA that he had his longest relationship, though getting him to admit to any emotional involvement with a woman is no easier than getting to Mr Thornton to discuss his feminine side.” She does then quote his actual words, but in a way that make him look almost detached from his own emotions but which the reader suspects was Armitage’s attempt to stay on the general as opposed to the specific level. When Armitage apparently won’t discuss his romantic life in any detail, Wark kindly — but again, condescendingly — puts the trope of virtuous Armitage in the place of an answer, all the while adding a subtly catty narration that undermines his statements: “He remains a solitary person, he insists. He has a house in suburbia which likes because there are lots of families around … he drives his dad’s old Citroën, and he still feels drawn to Yorkshire, where his father grew up — something to do with directness and honesty, he thinks.” [Italics mine.] Note that none of these are quotations from Armitage — they are restatements of things he is supposed to have said to Wark. His own quotation about personal qualities that make it difficult to live with others are left uncommented, but in the context of the burden of the general tone article, they run the risk of making him look like a little boy who is too messy or immature to live with a partner.

The conclusion of the article is truly telling, because the interviewer offers a first conclusion about Armitage, finally one that doesn’t fit all that badly with the data she’s presented, but then undermines it with an editorial description. First, she writes, “… this is Richard Armitage, committed to his acting, private about his personal life, and aware that whatever the ministrations of the Armitage Army, the two are separate entities. […] even when he does command leading roles … one suspects that he will not metamorphose into a Notting Hill smoothie.” So far, so good. But the final impression she leaves the reader with is quite different. In explaining the photo that must have gone with the piece, she writes, “Our photographer awaits him and for some reason RA disappears to change, emerging in a brand new shirt, complete with the creases from where it had been wrapped around the cardboard.” Naïve, naïve, naïve. No sense of his appeal to women. Can’t even dress himself appropriately. Isn’t that cute?

[Left: Richard Armitage as photographed by Rebecca Bradbury, from Vivid, Spring 2005. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com]

The main reason to interpret Wark’s reading to perception bleed as opposed to some other impulse is a comparison to a much better interview that appeared in Vivid Magazine in Spring 2005. While I don’t know anything about the publication and its readership (is this the Indian Vivid? some reader will know), Anwar Brett, the interviewer, is a freelance journalist who writes mostly about cinema for regional publications, occasionally interviews more well-known artists than Armitage was at the time, and clearly had a better idea about how to interview an artist as opposed to a celebrity. While the “romantic hero” angle was obviously the spur for the article here, as well, as a theme, it figures hardly at all in the interview, with Brett depicting Armitage as a quite serious artist with a smile on his face — “likeable,” he says. The only point at which Brett refers to Armitage as “nod[ding] shyly” is when he gets to Armitage’s attitude to the sex symbol question — and here Armitage is quoted as unashamed (an attitude, by the way, that’s been fairly consistent throughout his interview history): “I’m okay with that … If your defining moment is something that you’re not proud of, then you spend the rest of your career fighting it, but I don’t think North & South is something that will be a problem.” Of course, Brett doesn’t report asking Armitage about his romantic life or any response to such questions. Nonetheless, it seems plausible that given the question she was seeking to answer in her piece, Wark simply allowed her perception of Armitage’s unwillingness to be interrogated about his romantic life to color her entire reading of him.

Armitage businessman: The part everyone ignored

[Right: A slightly edgier-looking Richard Armitage as photographed by Rebecca Bradbury. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com]

So we’ve had a lot of Richard Armitages even in just a few pieces — the energetic, amused and amusing, silly guy; the man who speaks competently about his work; the struggling actor filled with gratitude, the sweet young man, the shy, little boy, the naïf. One final factor needs to be noted, mostly because it seemed to be something that very few fans have been interested in. Given Wark’s own typical range of interviewees, I’m surprised that she didn’t notice it: Richard Armitage, the man on the move. Fans eager to read the trope of modesty and ethics over the other matters may have been ready to elide this point completely, but it deserves a brief discussion simply because it’s been there from the beginning. Richard Armitage was possessed with at least an average helping of professional ambition.

This only makes sense. No one makes it even as far as Armitage had by 2004 in a performing profession by standing in the background and waiting to be rewarded. Indeed, following his own account, Armitage felt an early jolt in the direction of this recognition a decade earlier, when he wasn’t given a permanent role in Cats after understudying with such industry and alacrity. Admittedly, feeling ambition and talking about ambition are two different things, and one suspects from observing him that even early on, Armitage has always said much less than was on his mind and has often been willing to let the interviewer steer the conversation rather than moving it himself. Even so, his professional ambition also comes out in the early materials from after North & South and will do so repeatedly afterwards. Two other pieces from late 2004 and early 2005 make him seem both competent and confident in this regard. From the admission that he really desperately wanted to play Thornton, a statement in a radio interview when asked about the publicity that compared him to Colin Firth, that he wouldn’t mind having Firth’s career even though he didn’t think they were much alike, to his repeated statements from this period that he was looking at all kinds of scripts, searching for contrasting roles, including stage roles, the Richard Armitage of this period seemed willing to express a straightforward awareness of how the industry works and his own place in it. A telling statement about his fans that expands on the gratitude theme makes this point quite clearly:

Asked what message he would give to [his fans] he says, simply: “Thanks for your support and brilliant letters. It’s great to have so much positive feedback from everyone and over such a wide demographic.”

The demographic was not as wide as might have been wished, I suppose, as it was still primarily women, though women of all ages — but the speaker quoted here is no naïf. At this point, Armitage already knows quite well that industry guesses about the nature of viewer demographics cast roles, and he wants to say in public who he is — an actor who attracts a wide range of them.

VIII: Ceterum censeo: Who was Richard Armitage in 2004?

[Left: Richard Armitage as photographed by Jenny Lewis in 2004. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com]

So now that we know what the media said, have thought about how it might have worked on our perception, and seen what early and especially later readers were likely to ignore, what can we take away from it to talk about Richard Armitage in the wake of North & South?

The question of who he was as an actor is a theme I had to separate out here — it will have to come in a subsequent piece. I don’t want to give the impression that all I care about is his identity; I also care very much about his output. I’ve concentrated on this moment in his personality and persona in such detail, however, because it seems that a number of decisive things occurred — not just the sudden success, but his response to it, and the way that the journalists covered it.

Who is he? I hit this a bit in bullet points in the last post, so I want only to adumbrate that and talk a little bit about the whole question of Armitage’s awareness of what was brewing and how it might have affected him. He must have been aware of news reports commenting on the immediate fan reaction, because every reporter who interviewed him asked him about this effect, and his denials are more deflections or self-deprecations than statements of fact. Armitage had read the BBC message board, or parts of it, anyway, as statements to this effect came through clearly in several interviews. Doing so was attractive to him because he’d never had a review, and he was interested to see how audiences were receiving what had been done. He was also aware of what this success might do for his career, and remarks in his interviews indicate that he was ready, even eager, to take advantage of it. (At some point I had read a notice that his agent had gone to an early fan meeting or something like that, but I can’t find it now — in any case, were that true, it would also indicate a willingness to have an “army” behind him.)

In the face of all the other evidence from the period, then, I am disinclined to think that Armitage was really as sweetly naïve as Penny Wark wanted to make him — I think she is reading something into what seems to me more consistent with the Armitage trope of self-deprecation about fan attention and what has regularly come to the fore as discomfort with certain kinds of personal questions that may have expressed itself as retreat into reserve that she made sound bashful. She may also have been comparing him in her mind to a broader panorama of interviewees she had experienced. Nonetheless, fans liked somehow that Armitage did not preen for their appreciation, so that by the time I became a fan, the notion that Armitage was primarily shy, sweet and naïve unshakably dominated fan perception, though not solely on the basis of Wark’s article. (Later evidence in this discussion will be discussed in later pieces.)

At the same time, however, in acting competently in the sphere in which he found himself as opposed to the one in which most of his training had taken place, I read Armitage as plagued to some extent by mismatched context — interacting with television viewers as if they were members of stage audiences. These groups of people have somewhat overlapping but also clearly diverging expectations of their wish-objects. Maybe because they are not so heavily the objects of marketing campaigns as television (and blockbuster film) audiences, or maybe because they sit in the physical presence of the people who entertain them and thus cannot always easily shake the recognition that the actors are also people and not just images, theatergoers seem much more aware than television fans that what they see in performance is all an illusion, and in relation, they also seem much less troubled by the possibility that their heroes might not really be the people whose roles they follow so avidly, and more tolerant of their personal foibles. If Armitage was indeed naïve in 2004, it lay less in an otherworldliness that led to things like bringing shirts still in the package to photoshoots (as temptingly synecdochal as that detail might be) than in an initial failure to realize that he wasn’t speaking with people at the stage door before going off blissfully into the night and reassuming his own identity with all its potentially boyish or even rough edges. Hence moments like his attempt to set fans straight with information about himself in early messages (although I don’t know where he said he was a fan of U2), albeit with both humor and self-deprecation. Or discussions of clubbing in Paris, or the use of expressions like “toe rag,” or whatever.

[A bit enigmatic? And the slightly opened lips. Richard Armitage as photographed by Jenny Lewis in 2004. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com]

Initially, an energetic, occasionally silly, modest, somewhat shy, quite boyish but still self-aware actor takes the stage to speak about himself with a basic competence that figures in most of the venues. He has a tendency to stammer somewhat in radio interviews, but this is not jarring. But by mid-2005 journalists, notably Penny Wark, had taken the first steps toward pushing a different picture of Richard Armitage that would appeal to fans in a different way. It is this later version of his persona, and fan response to it, that will demand that Richard Armitage begin to play his own self as a character, although he appears not to have realized it initially, and to have resisted it once he had. Implicitly, the matters that fans will emphasize and reward later are peeking through here, most negatively the question of naïveté — if he had it — and its ambivalent appeal, discussed so extensively above, but more positively, the matter of ethics.

As stated in the previous post, it’s not hard to see where Armitage’s ethical position came from. The firm anchor of this ethics — forged in the frustrations of a decade of working with little reward, a system in which he clearly believes, and upon which he is later willing to expand for the benefit of fans — would both advantage and disadvantage him in the long run. Psychologically, one suspects, his ethics allowed him to deal with the increased attention without having his head turned, and, one suspects, aided him in dealing with the year after the North & South air date — although the performance as Mr. Thornton was significant to him and stunning to fans, immediate promotion to film or indeed any kind of stardom did not result, and attempts to audition in Los Angeles do not garner him a role offer that makes it to wider notice, a matter on which he commented, again self-deprecatingly, in interviews toward the end of 2005. Also on the positive side of the balance sheet, Armitage’s ethics, especially his modesty, which would emerge more clearly into view as 2005 wore on and he revealed himself as someone who wrote thank-you notes and wished people would donate money to charities instead of expending it on him, would endear him even more to his new sea of fans. On the other hand, as the picture of his ethics, modesty, shyness, and so on was built up both in the press and by statements he will make and then magnified by fan discussion, he became increasingly boxed in by the expectations of his fans, a tendency that concerned him, that led to a fateful statement in 2009, and that he would state in 2010 that he had to free himself from. Moreover, his repeated expressions of gratitude initially left him potentially overly open to, and also a bit at sea in terms of how to respond to, fans who he seemed not to realize did not share the same ethics or sense of boundaries as he expected from them. Given his new notoriety, the struggle to acknowledge fans appropriately and in response to a genuine gratitude, while still guarding a private life separate from public perception began, especially as new fans were often obviously star-struck and Armitage fandom is the first intense experience of fan mania for many.

In other words: if initial fans had a fantasy of Richard Armitage, Richard Armitage also had a fantasy of his fans that had to be modified as time went on, and he seemed strikingly persistent in the conviction that he could seek connections with fans somehow as he went on modifying this picture of himself. The aftermath of North & South thus led at first with some resistance and then with increased cooperation, or at least awareness of its necessity, to experiments with performing a third party that was neither Richard Armitage nor a dramatic role, but “Richard Armitage in public.” Much of the press of the period to 2011 was engaged with the trying on and working out of this persona. Initial performances of this public persona were markedly clumsy, which both reporters and fans tended to read as endearing; on one side, this meant he finally got cut some slack for not being the alpha male that his imposing physical appearance suggested for so long that he should be. He was described by reporters as mild-mannered, modest, and serious, but also as ready with a laugh or a quick aside, and enjoying “normal life” away from the spotlight. Early indications, which persisted in interviews until at least 2006, suggest that despite the North & South effect, Armitage continued to be blind-sided by the dimensions of reactions to him and did not credit them. One major noticeable, if unconscious, outcome of his inability or unwillingness to accept this change in interviews was an expression of incredulity so marked that it can be read (positively) as shyness, boyish giggliness, or naive sweetness or (negatively) as unprofessionalism, immaturity, or even self-undermining — which are flip sides of the same coin. The same serious, disciplined worker revealed again and again a love for ridiculousness that could be read either as a planned safety vent or an actual personality trait.

[Eyes like fire or ice? Richard Armitage as photographed by Jenny Lewis in 2004. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com]

Statements to press beginning with Cold Feet and Sparkhouse had already emphasized that Richard Armitage was not identical to his characters. This theme was queried virtually every time a journalist asked Armitage about his attractiveness to women in the wake of North & South, when he insisted repeatedly that he could understand why women might be attracted to Mr. Thornton or love Gaskell’s novel, but rejects the possibility that these affinities have anything to do with him. These statements may have been attempts to detach himself from the Thornton persona in particular, although in at least one interview he said that Thornton incorporated pieces of himself as well. Attempts to deflect attention from his person were read by fans in line with an ethic whose contours were appearing and, by underlining his apparent modesty, these perversely intensified fan admiration. As Armitage garnered more roles, however, his statements to the press would increasingly complicate the distinction between actor and character — as when he mentions an ongoing theme in his interviews present in the first Q & A — that it’s fun to play “baddies” because it allows the expression of moods or desires he is not allowed to express publicly. The possibility that Armitage’s roles were given pieces of himself that he felt unable to express made him even more intriguing to fans. It seemed in this period that he could hardly say anything that would turn fans off.

As I have suggested repeatedly, apparent Armitage paradox fascinates us. Similar tensions occurred in this initial period around aspects of his appearance, especially with regard to cosmetic dentistry, hair color, and clothing choices, all of which Armitage seemed to be changing reactively rather than proactively, suggesting an inner resistance to the trappings of the broadcast elements of show business. This tension is hard to parse. On the one hand, dancers are heavily and constantly concerned with the appearance of their bodies, and Armitage’s first press interviews for Cold Feet mentioned his concern about the appearance of his abs and discuss his choice of cheap shoes for his audition; he expressed concern about possibly having appeared fat as Lee. At the same time, early press from North & South pointed out his mostly modest dress and willingness to pull a shirt out of a cartoon to be photographed. Fans again read his struggles as a sign either that he was really “down to earth” and/or that his management or advising in this regard was incompetent. British management of average actors doesn’t usually extend to dressing their clients, but I think the dichotomy was never as strong as some readers have tended to make it. It wasn’t so much that Armitage didn’t care about his clothes — he did, or he wouldn’t have worn so many identifiable high fashion brands, nor would he have stuck with a style element so provocative of definitive opinions as his continued reliance on necklaces of various types. But his attempts to deal with fashion seemed primarily oriented toward consumption of items that would make him stylish if he wore them as opposed to the development of an individual, personal style, in which he seemed less interested. Only the Richard Armitage character would be given such a style, and only much later.

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All text that I wrote is © Servetus at me + richard armitage, 2012. Please credit when using excerpts and links. Texts of quotations as well as images and video copyrights accrue to their owners.

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Next: Part IX: Geez, I’ve written shorter texts than this for raise forms or P&T evaluations. It’s getting harder and harder for to say what will come out next, but the next part will cover matters up to his casting as Guy of Gisborne, and discuss more fully the ways in which Richard Armitage started to play the role of “Richard Armitage.” I hope I can get all that in. [Not linked yet.]

~ by Servetus on December 30, 2012.