Richard Armitage, nonsense articles, and the web

I’m putting this here as a screenshot rather than as a link because I don’t want to drive traffic to the site in question. I’ve been asked about it four times in the last week and now I see the rumor is making its way through the fandom, so I want there to be some enlightenment available on the topic. I am aware that I will probably regret doing this, but I wanted to compile the evidence so I don’t need to repeat myself.

So, I don’t know how this site works, but it definitely falls into the range of what we call clickbait — advertisers who put together headlines in order to generate click traffic and sell ads. When we click on a site that propagates provocative lies, we pay for and substantiate its existence. It offers a “login” option, so maybe someone actually created this nonsense, or maybe it aggregates information from various web traffic to put itself together. In any case the whole thing looks like a scam.

To wit:

1. Richard Armitage did not date Daniela Denby-Ashe; while they giggled on set and toured knitting museums together and had amazing screen chemistry, there was no romance, according to his own account.
2. Armitage probably met Annabel Capper at LAMDA, where his Spotlight CV stated he studied from 1996-8 and hers states she studied from 1995-98. The combined total of their known public appearances together and overlap is traced in this post. In 2009-10, they were spotted in public three times together: at the Carrie’s War premiere, at the Varekai gala, and at the after party for the Twenty-Four Hour Plays. There was a resurgence of interest in her after Armitage’s appearance in The Hobbit in December 2012, when crowds of new fans were trying to identify his partner, which may explain why this relationship is dated to 2013. But there was never any evidence that they were romantic partners at that time or at any time since. When this information was included in a newspaper article that coincided with The Hobbit, after I translated the article, another fan and I tried to convince the author to change it, but he was insistent. To some extent this rumor was probably cultivated by my ruminations about Capper, which ended in my speculation that she could have been the drama school relationship to which he has referred at least twice, and fanned by another blogger who misunderstood something I wrote — but it was only ever a rumor.
3. The odds that Richard Armitage is engaged to Samantha Colley are really low. There were no rumors while they were acting together, and as far as I remember, they have not been seen together since the Digital Theatre premiere of The Crucible in December 2014. Note, for the purposes of credibility, that the site above lists her as being 37. She graduated from Oxford School of Drama after attending from 2011-14, and The Crucible role was her first professional audition.

Of course, some people will always take the lack of evidence as evidence, but really: there is no evidence about this.

~ by Servetus on August 9, 2016.