Is Richard Armitage attracted to violent characters?

Richard Armitage as Raymond de Merville in first glimpse shot from Pilgrimage.

Maybe some people were all “Oh, goodie!” but I know, from chit-chat here and there this morning, that I’m not the only one whose heart sank when she read Richard Armitage’s upcoming film, Pilgrimage, described by the composer of its score as “hyper-violent,” in the wake of what some of us are already dreading in Hannibal and the news of the Bridget Cleary project. I doubt we’ll get off scot-free from this sort of thing with Clearance, either. Despite the violence of the projects in which I’ve already seen him, I have cut him a lot of slack in light of his statement in May 2010 that he had lobbied to make sure John Porter was not portrayed with a gun on a huge bilboard. That statement tended to make me think he was aware of the problem and that his heart was in the right place, even if he can’t control the violence in the stuff he appears in. I even remember defending him in light of his equivocating statements on this topic in New York Moves in November 2013. In the end, pragmatist that I am, I am sure that it is hard to find roles in films that don’t involve some kind of violence. People want to see it, and the actor is at the mercy of what the audience will pay for. Armitage has to take the roles he’s offered — as he said himself after finishing his role in Captain America, he doesn’t have a nice-guy face. People in the US apparently like to have a Brit playing a villain. I discount early roles with violent aspects (Ian Macalwain in Ultimate Force, for instance), which were “break into the industry roles.” But one can be a physical actor without embracing violent roles, and since The Hobbit, the proliferation of violent roles is obvious.

So, I wonder. It’s not that he should love rom-coms (and I remember him saying it wasn’t a genre that he turned to himself as a viewer). But why so much violence?

Mr. Thornton (Richard Armitage) punches Stevens in episode 1 of North & South. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

I’ve wondered for a long time about various things that might send Richard Armitage toward violent roles — not so much about the external, immutable circumstances mentioned above (his body and face, the state of the industry, its propensity to typecast) — but about internal factors. Over and over again we hear “Richard is nothing like his roles,” as from Peter Jackson, most recently from Bryan Fuller. It’s not that I think he’s dripping with violent tendencies and in fact, he absolutely gives the opposite impression personally and in public. But I have wondered about whether there aren’t factors in his own personality and preferences that make these roles interesting for him and make them comfortable, even beyond his statement that roles that are nothing like him are easier to play).

As a friend of mine asked me in email to me last night, “Are actors like musicians, who tend to have certain types of music that they just play better than others?” What about Glenn Gould, for instance, turned him into one of the world’s most unforgettable interpreters of J.S. Bach? One of the things he’s especially good at is pulling the right strands out of the complicated texture of Bach’s work without obscuring that texture — he had an intuitive capacity both to understand and to demonstrate what we should be paying attention to even while fitting it into the things all around it in the music.

Is violence a type of stage music that Richard Armitage is particularly gifted in interpreting for his audience? And if he is, then what about his internal world makes him able both to understand and communicate it?

Guy of Gisborne (Richard Armitage) threatens Lady Marian (Lucy Griffiths) shortly before murdering her, in Robin Hood 2.13. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

One really might have been tempted to ask the question about his internal world from the beginning, as one of the most frequently cited pieces of information on early Armitage fan sites was his preparation for a Society of British Fight Directors qualification. About the time that Armitage would have been attempting it, in the mid- to late 1990s, the Society was taken up into the British Academy of Stage and Screen Combat. While I don’t think we know if he ever obtained this qualification, according to wikipedia, nowadays “the test requires actors to perform a dramatic scene containing a stage combat fight, choreographed and taught by a BASSC certified teacher. Students are marked on both stage combat technique and the acting within the scene. Based upon marks the awards available are: Fail, Pass & Pass with Distinction.” We learned recently that he won a trophy for stage fighting at LAMDA. This would have been an eminently sensible decision for someone who wanted to appear in Shakespeare, of course, but was it primarily a practical one?

Some part of any personal propensity may lie in the whole relationship of dance to fighting as well, because both have to be choreographed. I’ve remarked on this for the case of Lucas North in particular at length and briefly for Thorin Oakenshield in The Battle of the Five Armies and rather tangentially for Porter. I’ve never been able to settle for myself, based on what we know, where exactly the young Richard Armitage stood on the line between being a reluctant dancer or an eager one; dance lessons at four for pigeon-toes, a bunch of kids in the same street who participated, a move to a stage school at 14, true admiration for his most important teacher there. Motives are always multiple, I think, and I’m sure he was a good dancer and wanted to go to it, even as there may have been additional reasons that suggested it. If he really did start at four, he probably doesn’t remember a time in his life before he was dancing. I think even before the recent revelations, there were always signs that Armitage hadn’t had the most idyllic childhood, and I’m not the only person who’s wondered if his mother said, “Let’s get this kid out of Dodge to a place where he can flourish.” If, once established as a dancer, he didn’t enjoy the sort of dancing he was doing, and that moved him toward pursuing acting roles, still he has always called himself a very physical actor, and has stressed over the years the ways in which each character’s physicality has been central to its identity.

John Porter (Richard Armitage), temporarily knocked over by Vincent (Mzwakhe Philemon Dlamini), in Strike Back 1.3. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

So for the internal world, I can think about physicality and movement, and a perhaps instinctive capacity to think about things in terms of movement, perhaps reinforced in his years of training. I can also connect it to his love of the adrenaline rush in action — such scenes must be even more high adrenaline than acting plain. But I’m still curious about the insight level — what does Armitage see in violence? What does he show us, or want to show us, via violence?

And if he’s picking all these violent roles — he’s stated that he’s involved the Irish project as a producer, so it’s very much something he’s chosen and not something that’s forced on him? — what does he understand about it and what about his interpretation of it makes it more convincing or understandable to an audience? Is there something in this roles that he’s working through?

~ by Servetus on June 14, 2015.