Lucas comforts with a look, or: Richard Armitage reassures in Spooks 8.5
[Hey there. Still on the program of making sure to write about Richard Armitage every day as self-care, I’m publishing this. I will get to answering comments again as soon as my students are resettled in their routines after a week off. Thanks.]
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Lucas North (Richard Armitage) tells Sarah Caulfield (Genevieve O’Reilly) that she couldn’t have done anything to prevent Samuel Walker’s death, at the beginning of Spooks 8.5. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com
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Lucas North (Richard Armitage) reacts in concern to Sarah Caulfield’s (Genevieve O’Reilly) rejection of his advances, in Spooks 8.5. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com
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Lucas North (Richard Armitage), again reacting to statements by Sarah Caulfield (Genevieve O’Reilly) that she should have done something, urges her to believe that she can’t change the past, in Spooks 8.5 … Source: RichardArmitageNet.com
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… and comforts her with a look, and a kiss, even though he knows now that she’s lying. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com
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On the point about Armitage for reassurance that Guylty started and which I pursued yesterday via a brief examination of Armitage’s performance as John Standring:
Lucas North was one of the most laconic roles Richard Armitage played up to the date that Spooks 7 appeared. To some extent, one assumes the gestural compression that typified Lucas happened because the spook was a spy — he was supposed to be unobtrusive, unemotional, and perhaps capable of being more than a little bit cruel. Perhaps, too, Armitage felt a personal or artistic need to differentiate Lucas from Guy of Gisborne, whom he was playing concurrently for part of the time he played Lucas, and who had one of the most Baroque gestural and facial repertoires in all of the Armitage oeuvre. Lucas consisted at times of a gestural collection edited down to a bare minimum, to the point that critics occasionally charged (particularly in series 9) that Armitage was wooden. Armitage’s defenders, in contrast, termed the stillness of Lucas subtle and deft.
In any case, no matter how you see this question, Spooks 8.5 offered one of the most typical sorts of Armitage as Lucas moments for reassurance: the move toward reassurance with the eyes. Above, we see it in Lucas’ interactions with Sarah Caulfield. Whether his eyes were fully open or hooded, Lucas seemed to be seeking to bind Sarah to him (and, as the plot of the series unfolded, to the “good guys”) merely with the focus of his eyes, a chain of connection forged by an intense, pregnant stare, a look so full of something emotional that insisted on its own sincerity and thus sought to reassure Sarah that Lucas could hold her up merely by the force of his own emotions or beliefs. “Believe me,” the look says again and again: “You are all right, you did what you could, look at me and believe me because my look believes in you, the feeling my eyes show you can buoy you even if you don’t believe in yourself.”
In an interesting parallel to the paradoxical quality of Standring’s gestures of reassurance in Sparkhouse (that Standring’s comfort appears strongest at the points where is most vulnerable), it’s fascinating that as Spooks 8.6 unfolds, and Lucas realizes increasingly that Sarah is not only responsible for Samuel Walker’s death, but must be a motive component of “Nightingale,” this facial expression erodes and dissolves in meaning. Lucas’ ever more futile attempts to reassure Sarah by signals of “believe me” in his eyes turn into a sort of disintegration of his own belief in himself or his perceptions of the world — which ends in his request, at the end of the episode, for Sarah to take him with her.
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Lucas North (Richard Armitage) makes one last attempt to elucidate the truth from Sarah Caulfield (Genevieve O’Reilly) at the end of Spooks 8.6 — as if he’s urging her to believe she could be someone else … Source: RichardArmitageNet.com
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… but then his glance turns inward, as if the end of his belief in her signals a parallel end of his belief in himself as Lucas North. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com
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Lucas seeks to reassure by making Sarah believe, an argument he makes to her again and again — entreatingly — with his eyes; when he cannot make her believe, when he cannot reassure her, his own belief disintegrates, even if only momentarily. Again and again Armitage works to constitute the faith and nature of a character via the success or failure of his relationships with other characters, relationships that he seeks to communicate gesturally, or in this case, with the glance that seeks to save everything for both Sarah and himself. When the intense look fails to connect, to reassure, to reconstitute Sarah as a moral actor, or to alter the course of events that have made Sarah into much more of a villain than Lucas realized, it also begins to eat at the person who puts the power into the glance. When Lucas cannot reassure, he loses something of himself.
But that is another story for another day. Guylty will be with us again in a few hours, eine wahre Freude!
Me + Richard Armitage 
“Wooden” performance? *gasps* Seriously. I think he was, as you said, extremely subtle but not any less vivid in his characterisation of Lucas in Spooks 9. – The communication with the eyes was central to the role/plot in context with Sarah, as words quite obviously had no power to convince. Your screenshots are well chosen examples that perfectly illustrate the variety of gaze, and how much is communicated with it. The look in the eyes is what makes me suspend my knowledge that I am looking at an actor *playing* a role and instead watch the character acting his destiny.
In a way, I think, Lucas is attempting to show strength with his vulnerability here, too, just like Standring. Particularly when he implores her to take him with her. Yes, his beliefs may have been eroded, but he is letting on that he loves her and will therefore throw his lot in with hers (vulnerability) and shows strength by communicating a belief that “together they can get through this”.
Garbled. I think I have to re-watch Spooks 8.6.
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I had to rethink a lot of what I thought about Spooks 8 after rereading Alyssa’s long post about her reaction to Lucas. There’s a very intriguing thing Armitage says about Lucas’ relationship to Sarah in some of the pre-broadcast stuff that’s a bit ambiguous and so you sometimes wonder about the level of veracity in Lucas’ statements, but as you know, I’m a “both / and” girl.
Yeah, the big UK tv critic (I forget who it was, a woman, who had interviewed him in the pre-series publicity blitz and then turned against him) called him “wooden” two or three times. It was really annoying.
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While I think Lucas was honestly wanting to comfort Sarah after the death of her boss, at the memorial service and later, when she rebuffs him, I think he was conveying something different when he tells her she can’t change the past. (8.5) That’s the scene where he says something about finding out people weren’t who you thought they were. He’s talking about himself and his pain, sending a coded message to her, and I’ve always thought he knows this is ending soon. You can see the expression in his eyes, and with the lines above his nose in the first shot, that he is troubled by what’s she saying ( her bald faced lie), and then the surrender in next cap -almost to stop her from saying more.
I think a less talented actor would have played the first cap with his back still to her, but Richard Armitage doesn’t have to. He can let us know what he’s really thinking without giving it away to Sarah.
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There are at least three things going on the bedroom scene plotwise; this is a post about Armitage’s use of his eyes as a gesture of comfort and not about what his eye movements in these scenes mean for all of Spooks 8 or even all of Spooks 8.5/ 8.6. Keep in mind that the goal of these posts at the moment isn’t a full elucidation of everything they might mean; it’s me trying to write my way out of my current emotional state by talking about my responses to certain scenes that I’m watching heavily at the moment. It’s possible that Lucas is going to become my comforter in distress right now, and I wouldn’t have guessed that because that hasn’t been what Lucas / Spooks has been about for me, so far anyway.
That said, I don’t think that Lucas’ position is either / or, here, and I think comfort / hope are an important piece of what’s still going on here even though at this point nothing about her can surprise him anymore. I think at this point (based on Armitage’s remark to Ian Wylie in Digital Spy) Lucas is still thinking multiple things. One of them is that it has to end, which he knows as soon as she lies (and, of course, he goes into this scene knowing that he’s manipulating her, because he’s been ordered to by his boss) but keep in mind that the series suggests he has intercourse with her at least twice more before she disappears; he defends her to Ros even after this; and he’s clearly emotionally torn even in the final episode of the series, when he’s talking to her in the emergency room. Humans don’t simply let go of their emotions — even betrayal — quite so quickly; our actions aren’t always in concert with our knowledge, and this is one of the most poignant aspects of Armitage’s work in the second half of Spooks 8. What I’m trying to bring out here moves toward the conclusion in my final paragraph — that his reassurance of her as a trajectory that becomes increasingly and obviously untenable is also a message that he is sending to himself that has consequences for his own character.
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Comment threads have a life of their own, sometimes independent of the original post as did yesterday’s about John Standring. A jumping off point. My comment was as much in response to Guylty’s as to the original post.
I don’t recall the interview where he was referred to as wooden, except for some fan comments, so if someone can find it I’d appreciate it.
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Prefiro Lucas e Maya…
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I think Guylty already covered that one, however. I don’t like to repeat stuff that’s already been said. 🙂
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I still wonder why Lucas is my favourite RA character, can´t exactly point a finger on it.
So thank you very much for this post, I totally agree with it, reassuring someone only with a look or gesture, not mentioning one´s lonely inner trouble and trying with this gesture to reassure oneself, too. I think that´s one aspect that really touched my heart…
But I wonder while RA playing LN in S8 knew in what character Lucas would transform in S9. As I remember in the TV-interviews done before airing S9 he mentioned he was surprised what you`d discover about LN… Or maybe there was a lot he brought into the scripts also (just speculating)?
Would like to know more of your RA-character´s analysees (love the “John Standring” one).
Go on with your students…
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No, Armitage had no idea what would happen in series 9. No one did as the scripts were written subsequently. I tend to prioritize a method called “text as read” (or in this case, seen), which considers the total effect of the source as it appears (not as it is constructed).
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