ICYMI: Marlise Boland interviews Richard Armitage at Paleyfest
Dude — as far as I am concerned you can totally keep taking your clothes off.
Me + Richard Armitage
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Me + Richard Armitage 
Lots of hugging going there. He didn’t do that with other interviewers, did he?
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They have a “special relationship,” I guess.
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Das war ja mal vergleichsweise “professionell” 😉
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Yeah, they only touched once, right? 🙂
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Ja, total abgekühltes Verhältnis 🤣🤣🤣
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!!!
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I think their rapport probably stems from how much fun he had with her in the first interview she did with him. (He says at the end of this one, “Shall we get the wheeled chairs out again?”) That rapport did translate into a good interview this time IMO.
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I have a really different reading of that interview based on visual cues. If you say so.
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Well I suppose the comment about the wheeled chairs could be sarcasm. I don’t think so, but he is, after all, a good actor. Only he knows for sure whether he cringes or is pleased when he sees her coming for him.
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I think he uses a retreat into the absurd as a coping mechanism in situations that make him uncomfortable (not just with her — elsewhere as well) and it was heavily on display in those original interviews. I don’t think he’s uncomfortable here but I don’t think he enjoys interviews with her anywhere near as much as she seems to think.
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That’s possible. I enjoyed the original interview, which seemed to me to be playful on both sides. The one in the booth in the restaurant seemed extremely uncomfortable to me. In fact I really disliked watching it.
Too bad we can’t ask him — but he’s so gracious that he wouldn’t let on how he felt anyway.
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And he’s stuck with her, given his various cooperations with her and her apparent capacity to weasel her way into the Hollywood entertainment scene. He created this problem for himself, so I don’t have much sympathy for either one of them on this score.
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Huh. I just looked up her ancient background and found that she was Miss California 1988. Her performance of “I Dreamed a Dream” at the Miss America pageant was really good! Not exactly the same line of work…
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She sang on cruise ships for a while, too, and did some work in musicals out out on the West Coast, I think, and has worked getting her family and friends into various show biz capacities as an agent of some kind. She doesn’t have any training as a journalist that I am aware of. This youtubing thing is her dream, and I’m supportive of people following their dreams, but she doesn’t seem to be improving at all as an interviewer.
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It’s not a journalistic style for sure. I wonder what her degree is in.
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Iirc she did advanced study in voice / music performance? I researched her background extensively when she was busy telling me and Perry to shut up, but that was two years ago now so I’ve forgotten a lot of the details.
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Ahh. Yeah I read a bit of that a while back. Not so professional on her part.
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I just looked again — there’s a page that lists her as a Drama major at USC.
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Absolutely my sentiments, Servetus! Just wasn’t sure whether she really has said that…
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You have five minutes to talk to the guy about the new season of his show in which he’s starring and the big question you have to ask is about the nude scenes?
Three years she’s been doing this now.
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Not to mention that the promo event was for Season 2, and she burst out asking him about Season 1. I guess she had no interview for S.1. Even he was confused, because he asked her what episode she was talking about. I think he got in what he wanted to – but, his comments about Daniel and Esther seem contrary to other facts we’ve heard about this season’s relationship. Something about “taking a different direction.” I agree – that final hug in the interview was awkward – like when you have to let some strange old relative hug you.
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BTW, to me it looks like the table have turned a little, and she’s less comfortable with him. He seems more in control.
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I agree. It probably helps that he’s not alone with her and there’s an event with other people making demands on him — but in general, I thought he was really poised and in charge (from what we’ve seen so far). It’s a good look on him.
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Why do you think she’s less comfortable with him? BTW is she the one who had this twitter meltdown about RA’s fans asking her about him?
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She has a long history with us — particularly after some of us became critical of her. I think she basically hates his fans now, but she hitched her start to his. I’d kind of been hoping she’d be able to transfer her patronage stream to the Outlander actors / fandom, or else Poldark.
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Do you think RA is aware of her reservations towards his fans?
Maybe that’s why the interview was a wee awkward? Maybe she’s also a little to full on for his taste e.g. the hugging?
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Well — if you think he reads blogs, he will be very aware of the reservations many of us have about her.
However: I think she’s just an awkward interviewer. Slightly less awkward than she was in, I guess, 2013 when she started this whole thing. If you watch her interviews with other artists you see similar things, there’s often a sign of discomfort in the interviewee.
re: what he thinks of her, I could not venture to say. As SueBC said downstream, he always tries to be gracious, no matter who interviews him.
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I do. There were a number of flare-ups on social media, that, if he were even paying 25% attention, he couldn’t miss. Also, there was the decision to place his Christmas Message one year, directly on Twitter, at a time when there was a lot of angst about him giving it to her. But she has plenty of supporters among his fans.
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yeah — it continually astounds me when I read it but to be fair, a ton of people love her interviews with him. I think there might be some kind of identification going on there between the fans and her, i.e., this is someone like me getting to interview him (hypothesis).
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in retrospect I think the thing that bugs me about that incident most is that it’s just a condition of doing business. The big fan sites always had messages on their main pages: I do not represent Armitage, I am not in touch with Armitage, etc., etc. Very occasionally Armitage’s agent got in touch with someone like Ali to say, make sure that people know the conditions for getting a response to autograph requests, etc. Even I occasionally get requests to tell him something or whatever.
In comparison, Marlise Boland is actually in touch with him or his agent (presumably). And for a time she really was asserting that she was the voice of fans for / to him. So she shouldn’t have been surprised when she got some disturbing queries, because many of his BNFs have over the years. (Plus, you add different fan cultures into the mix, and the possibility of trolls, etc. — there are a couple of people who have been very active in trolling the Armitage fandom.)
I agree it’s annoying to get this stuff, but when she blew up about it, the people who were doing the thing she didn’t like either didn’t notice it or were happy she reacted to them. The rest of us were like, oh, here we are subjected to a tirade for something we didn’t do, all of tarred with the same brush.
It was really unprofessional of her to do it and the fact that it was happening at all was an index of her success.
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Are you referring here to the incident where she ranted against fans she alleged were asking for set-ups, and then posted a sort of snarky notice?
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I assume that’s what we’re talking about.
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It was one of the flare-ups I was remembering, but wasn’t at the forefront. I was thinking more about the instance when she wrote that FB post, then blocked some fans.
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Ah, well, I assume she’d do some things differently now.
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Didn’t know about fb
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Yes, Perry, that incident.
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“It’s a dance.”
Alright, if you say so…
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“Dirty Dancing”
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OMG 😲 touché!
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I actually think he came up with a pretty good answer there — although if the way Daniel Miller has sex is a dance, it’s a very athletic ballet. Like, I don’t know how natural that is except for extremely coordinated people in good physical condition. My impression is most people go for something at least 50% horizontal.
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Well, they were desperate to get it on, and in their haste they couldn’t wait to go horizontal, I suppose.
But yes, that was whay struck me, as well. Answering a saucy question in such a clean way. He’s a master at keeping it clean- if he wants to 😂
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well, she pretty clearly indicated a sort of fundamental prudery in her question. That kind of boxed him in — he could say “I don’t mind taking off my kit” or “part of me enjoys those scenes” after such a pointed question. (Not saying he feels either of those things, but the question rhetorically limited the possible polite answers to it.)
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Well, he navigated that particular shallow pretty well 😉
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I agree. I thought he had a great response when, almost right off the bat she went off message ( referencing Season 1 instead of 2) to wipe her brow in response to the sex scenes. She must have just re-watched Season 1 ( not a bad idea) before the festival. He, on the other hand, took the question/comment and ran with it – describing how the direction for such a scene worked, and then bringing the focus to Season 2. Whether I believe him or not, I think he handled it like a real pro.
She gave the impression, when she first made the comment, that she had just seen him having sex on screen, and was a little embarrassed about seeing him in person. I don’t know if it was real or feigned, but I guess she hasn’t bothered with Between the Sheets, and/or she’s forgotten Spooks/MI5.
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I guess what confused me is that the end she did say she saw the first two episodes of season 2. So she would have known that Daniel was fully clothed so far, I would have thought. I agree, it was a good save.
But even so: the major thing she took away from season 1 was the sex scenes? I mean: whistleblowing???
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Dreggisch Ringelrei 😁
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“pool dance” as a gogo dancer.
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🙂
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I liked this a lot, and as long as he laughs a lot on set, he can absolutely dobwhatever he wants 😜
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Sorry – autocorrect – do what ever
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This is better than most of her interviews but it’s still inferior to the other one we’ve seen.
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My point referred to the answers. RA brings interesting stuff to the table regardless of question-quality.
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Maybe, maybe not. The better the interviewer, the better the stuff he comes up with. There’s a significant difference, for instance, when he gets interviewed by the WSJ entertainment reporter, to stuff like this. If he doesn’t get asked interesting questions, he can’t offer interesting answers.
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Loved his comment that his parents think he has given up acting he knows how the people in the UK have been suffering at the drought.
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Maybe that’s why there still hasn’t been a streaming or DVD option for the UK. I know a lot of people were happy to hear this.
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what struck me about this interview is how he said he pleaded with the writers to let his own political opinions be expressed through Daniel by the end of the season, that he’s so uncomfortable with the thought that the viewers might think he feels the way that his character is depicting. that bothers me. how are we supposed to detach ourselves from who he is as a person off screen in order to make his on screen performances stand on their own, when he says things like that? his characters aren’t him, and yet now I’m wondering how true that statement actually is
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I thought that was odd too. He does not appear to give the audience much credence in being able to distinguish the difference between the character(s) he’s portraying and his own personality and opinions. Maybe the ‘problem’ lies with him: after months playing a role, maybe the lines between Daniel/ Trevor and Richard the actor become somewhat blurred….
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I wonder if he still has the rage at Spooks series 9 in the back of his mind when he makes comments like this. There were really a lot of people back then who just could not accept that he wouldn’t be playing a hero. (Comparable to the insistence in some quarters that Guy was never a villain). I’m never entirely sure who he thinks he’s speaking to in particular interviews, but he must have been aware this is one fans would pay a lot of attention to.
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Blur …! Difficult to catch this character there. He escapes. As escapes, a little, Richard Armitage behind his impeccable shape of classic actor with perfect technique. Some comedians are above all singular personalities, others seem to fade behind the roles to better live their share of madness in the game. Perhaps visibly, he could belong to this second category.
But he does not seem to assume his choices and he morphs in not credible explanations apologizing to the fans, the spectators and even his family for non-broadcast in media easily accessible.
Previously, he said that he wanted to “educate” the taste of his fans from the first hour. At the end he ought to have the guts to admit it!( that finally, he wants to separate from fans with a certain profile)
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I think you make a really good point. I sympathize with your frustration.
However, and I don’t know how to balance these considerations with my agreement with your mild frustration about his comments: I also think that what we’re talking about here is a special case — the question of neo-Nazism is a huge one in both Germany and frankly, in the US. At least for me, it’s not “just another political issue” that we can agree to disagree on — things like health insurance or rearmament or stuff like that. It’s not even on the level of a question like “is XYZ an example of racism,” which is more fundamental but is still something that reasonable people can disagree on. The question of whether one can support neo-Nazism goes pretty fundamentally to the core of a person’s identity. I don’t say this only because I’m Jewish, although also because of that — I think it gets to the question of whether we really believe “all men were created equal” or don’t. Neo-Nazism isn’t ordinary racism; it’s exterminationism.
I’ve already had a few disturbing YT comments on the vid I put up to circumvent the geoblocking, which I have now hidden. It’s conceivable to me that the show could become a target of white supremacist trolls, depending on what happens. It’s conceivable that people will make memes of Daniel Miller saying racist things and that’s Richard Armitage’s face on them.
Like I said — I am not sure how to balance these considerations, at least not yet.
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I agree that it’s weird that he lobbied for his fictional character to express some of his RL political opinions – but the way I interpret Daniel, I think there might be some overlap, notwithstanding Armitage is British European and Daniel is American. Maybe that’s the way he made the case to the screenwriters. But yeah, and he has made interview statements in the past that seem to fit the need of the moment.
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Yeah — I assume Daniel is not a racist and neither is Armitage. My guess would have been that Daniel was a bit more pragmatic about it in a sort of CIA way (neo-Nazism is a threat to the political and social order — I kind of hope they don’t treat onto the Spooks ground of “oh no, millions of people will DIE!!”) whereas Armitage would be more ethically motivated. I think most people would find it difficult to infiltrate a group with opinions so strongly opposed to their own and that Daniel can do that because of his political or professional convictions whereas Armitage, if he were not playing a spy, wouldn’t be the kind of person who worked for an intelligence agency.
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He definitely felt comfortable in this interview and was very Interesting. I think when he said about his character expressing “his” views, I took it to mean that he felt it was time to give his character more substance and from what I saw in S1, Daniel came off as more a viewer in the show than showing any real personality coming thought. Every once in a while you saw a crack… but I am hoping S2 is much more interesting and you can begin to feel for Daniel, even though a character in a series…he did not elicit any strong feelings from me in S1. Only the fact that I love to watch RA act is the reason I watched the whole show. Also, I would not be surprised if he had input into the name of “Trevor” as his undercover name. Just as Guy had the middle name of Crispin.
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This isn’t a spoiler-capable post, but I do think they were trying at the beginning of episode 1 to give us more ground for sympathy with or at least understand of Daniel. However, it wasn’t very well done in my opinion.
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If you really need entertainment watch “Intouchables” or the new Eric Toledano and Olivier Nakache’s movie to be released next week “Le sens de la fête” a wedding comedy movie about the back stage with great ideas and great actors!
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Still waiting for BS series 1 here in Oz…
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The information I had said it is streaming on SBS On Demand?
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Yes it is but it’s been delayed until December!
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you might still get it before the UK does.
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In the interest of balance: KellyDS did a post a while back on what she loved about the Anglophile channel interviews with him:
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