Playing evil: What did Richard Armitage seek — artistically — from Francis Dolarhyde?

[Contents: No problematic pictures; discussion of the problem of evil and portraying an evil character; abstract references to violence and blood but no specific discussions of either.]

Thanks to MargotMat for raising this question for me in this particular form. I wonder if that weibo post today indicates that he’s finished filming Hannibal? Supposedly the production filming in Toronto continues till April 2nd. Which is ten days off. Anyway. He’ll be out of the cold soon.

Richard Armitage conceded in 2011 that he was more likely to be cast in hard-man roles (whether villains or heroes) due to the shape of his face, which was not that of a “good guy.” So cue the villain roles for Armitage, apparently (although I think that the realization of Thorin Oakenshield on screen in the interval might have played havoc with this prediction.)

Since Guy of Gisborne, at least, it’s been an explicit and repeated theme of Richard Armitage’s discussion of his construction of characters he plays that he looks for good within bad, so much so that he was concerned that he made Guy of Gisborne too likeable for audiences to understand why he had to have his comeuppance. He has repeated this discussion about the complexity of villains more recently in his discussion of what he would try to do if he played a psychotic serial killer. Indeed, he said in that interview that he was “just waiting” to be offered a serial killer role (although who knows whether he winked when he said it). He’s also indicated a periodic struggle with the demand to be beautiful over the years. We’ve noted before that this kind of role was thus likely to be of high desirability to him. And his tweet earlier this year really put a point on his desire not to be at least conventionally attractive — Glamour material — in this role.

Richard Armitage tweets in response to his location on GlamourUK’s 100 sexiest list, February 6, 2015. Source.

To me, what Armitage has said on the question of abandoning beauty has customarily been organized against the axis of our traditional association of “beautiful” with “good” in the West, as when he cited a desire for an “elephant man” phase and stated he wanted to play “ugly, damaged” people. If he plays Dolarhyde, whether or not he achieves his goal of being creepy, Dolarhyde is unlikely to be truly ugly, so the axis of the show’s value orientation may try to raise the tempting and problematic association of “beautiful” with “evil.” If, indeed, Dolarhyde is evil at all (in the sense I’m thinking about, à la the self-description of Goethe’s Mephistopheles [my translation]: “a part of that force / that always wills evil … the spirit that always negates … so that everything that you call sin, destruction, or briefly, evil, is my actual element”).

I just wonder how Armitage has been thinking about this problem over the years. The Elephant Man was ugly and damaged, but the way the trope has usually been emplotted in theater, his goodness was misunderstood because people could not see beyond his deformities. He was damaged, in other words, but not evil; his ugliness served a mirror for the meanness and superficiality of people who thought he was a freak and thus forced him to earn his living by exploiting (or being exploited by) their disgust with his appearance. I wonder, too, whether serial killers are evil in the sense that they will the bad in the way that Mephistopheles did; they seem (from what I understand based on what I read about the extremely rare cases) not so much to rejoice in committing evil acts as to feel compulsion to pursue their desires, which they know are evil, but cannot avoid fulfilling. They are thus driven more by a damaged psychology or a failure to control their base desires rather than by a conscious malevolence per se. Hannibal Lecter, of course, seems to be an exception to that rule, in that laying aside his pursuit of his own psychological needs, he seems to relish planning to be bad. But at least as the Francis Dolarhyde character is constructed in the novel, he seems to be killing as a means of constructing a stronger self, one that cannot be harmed in the way his childhood self had been. This can be said to be egocentric, I suppose, but not truly evil. Lecter, in contrast, is more Mephistophelian than Dolarhyde, that’s certain. As his behavior demonstrates, Lecter wills the destruction or negation of all (good) ends, while Dolarhyde still knows, recognizes, and can be attracted by the good.

It strikes me in thinking about this problem that just as Armitage struggled with his construction of Gisborne, conflicts may arise between what I understand his priorities around these issues to be — that is to say, to play ugly, damaged people; to make villains sympathetic or at least comprehensible; but at the same time to escape the burden of attractiveness. A character we like, for most of us, is at least somewhat attractive on a deeper level than the physical. Most of us do not want to find ourselves attracted to evil, and as the reaction to many fans to the violence and gore involved in Hannibal suggests, some of us are simply not capable of taking, or have good reasons for refusing to take, that step — or even risking the possibility. In order for us to be able to find the character truly evil, however, at least at an initial level, the character will have to have very little appealing about him. A too-evil Dolarhyde makes the character unrelatable; a too-relatable Dolarhyde risks damaging the story line. Yet, as MargotMat says, it’s hard to want to watch anything if one cannot empathize at least somewhat with a character, and it’s hard to see Armitage playing any character without making him somehow empathy-capable. Associating “beautiful” with “evil,” if the show does that, raises the possibility that it will create an effect of alienation by means of which we are drawn in because of some ground for empathy or sympathy, but then realize that we have been attracted to something that is thoroughly evil, with self-disgust as the result for us. The disgust is not so much at the character, but at our own failure to recognize what is happening and reliably reject something evil. No matter how you slice it philosophically, then, the actor who plays this role is dancing on a tight-rope.

However we approach it, insofar as evil in drama traditionally throws up this mirror against the self by which we measure our own virtue, the way that we view characters who are evil definitely shows us something about our own internal capacities not just for empathy or revulsion, but also for identifying and understanding evil as an element in our own identities. I wonder where Armitage will eventually locate his own resolution of these competing priorities — and whether, and where, his viewers will do the same.

~ by Servetus on March 22, 2015.