Abandoning role agnosticism, or: In praise of Armitage human

Richard Armitage as Chop in Urban and the Shed Crew — as Chop has descended into addiction.

What roles should Richard Armitage be pursuing? I have typically said: “On principle, I don’t know.”

I try to remain agnostic as to role choice, apart from believing that Armitage is at his best on stage and preferring live action of any kind to voice acting, narrations or voiceovers. But I lack data. I don’t get to see what he throws his hat in the ring for, what he’s offered and turns down, or what he gets offered but can’t make work. I’ve stayed out of the frequent debates over whether his agent(s) represent him effectively for the same reason. I figure they have more information than we do, he has more information than we do, and Armitage is the best person to say what he wants. Moreover I don’t enjoy pining for a particular prospective role; I find both doing it and reading about it exhausting and aggravating. I was really invested this spring in following the course of the announced stage appearance, and on edge because the scheduling would have been hard to manage for me and expensive given the time-frame for decision-making, and then crushed when it didn’t materialize after all. Now, of course, we know that he probably decided to spend the time with his mother, which is what he should have been doing and any of us who’d had the opportunity would have done. And this fact should be a reminder to me that I created the problem of unhappiness for myself by allowing myself to be drawn out of my resolve to be agnostic. I let myself build up too many expectations. So I haven’t published (and won’t) a lot of stuff here about role rumors unless I find the role particuarly interesting, or the rumor seems very solid. It’s often hard to figure out the difference between an actual rumor and wishful thinking propagated by fellow fans. In recompense for trying to keep myself from engaging in wishful thinking, I allow myself the freedom as fan to respond frankly to actual castings and then to the projects as they appear. These approaches make me an uncomfortable fan, both because I don’t share in the camaraderie of speculation, and because my judgments are not comfortable for every reader.

So tonight I’m going to break the first rule about avoiding wishing for anything role-wise, and I’m going to say what I wish Armitage would do.

I want him to play real people.

Richard Armitage as Kenneth in Love, Love, Love: “I’m serious. I want to talk to you. I want you to be honest, this isn’t funny” (p. 83).

I’d been thinking this in fairly vague terms since seeing Love, Love, Love. Kenneth is in many ways a caricature, but there were still “real” moments in that play that spoke to me, particularly his repeated pleas to his wife to be sincere with him. There were moments of genuine pain and desire on Armitage’s face. I thought it would have been no huge step from this role to something like Edward Albee or Tennesee Williams, admittedly not my favorite playwrights, but who wrote plays with a lot of emotional depth and conflict. In contrast, Daniel Miller confused me a bit, insofar as the show builds almost nothing into the character and it’s increasingly hard to sympathize with that nothing after the first season. In season one, we at least knew how he felt about his family and his past (confused, conflicted) and we could ponder his problem of being hunted by his own bosses, but in season two, although it would have been easy to build that in, in terms of showing his relationship to the neo-Nazis he was infiltrating, the showrunners apparently decided not to.

After the second season of Berlin Station, I thought, okay, Castlevania, Wolverine, why not. These genre roles are popular and they let people know who he is. And he does make something out of genre roles; he’s not just a placeholder; he adds value. I think every day about Thorin Oakenshield, and even if I still shudder about Francis Dolarhyde, that only demonstrates that he made an impact on me. If Daniel Miller is what’s on offer — well, genre roles are deeper than that, the aspersion cast at them notwithstanding. And since that’s all the rage right now, building up his geekdom street cred will keep him in work and me seeing him.

But then: Chop.

Richard Armitage as Chop in Urban and the Shed Crew.

I’ve only seen it a few times — I don’t want to keep paying on-demand fees to see it, and Candida Brady has tweeted that a DVD won’t be available until September, which I think given her track record is a somewhat optimistic prediction. I kept pausing it and rewinding it so I could watch certain pieces repeatedly. You could almost call it “not wanting to let it end.” But nonetheless, one thing is clear — Chop is a human, less a caricature than any other character Armitage has played in quite some time. Admittedly, if we look at his indie “lost period” the competition for human verisimilitude isn’t very challenging. Chop is more fully developed than Raymond de Merville (who needed to be shown largely without sympathy to achieve the filmmaker’s propagandistic purpose), Tom Cahalan (who’s trapped as a character between a bad script and the need to play a real person who’s probably hard to talk about honestly), and Scott White (who’s primarily Ahna O’Reilly’s character’s wish fulfillment and not real at all). Chop has a subtle interior life, a conscience that chooses between real alternatives rather simply obeying a genre character’s compulsion, he is mightily flawed, he’s conflicted, he has his own ends rather than serving the ends of other people or the purposes of the story, he goes on a journey, he is often self-contradictory, he changes, wanes, waxes.

Not that some genre characters don’t do some of these things, too — but Chop is more relatable than all of these, as he lives in a world that resembles one I can recognize, one that is not determined by the fantasy lives of its authors or the stylized aestheticism of its own conventions. It is a world that I can move through. Above all, we can imagine a different ending for the human Chop in ways that are impossible for most of the other characters that Armitage has played recently.

Claude Becker (Richard Armitage) and Daphne Kluger (Anne Hathaway) kiss for their lives in Ocean’s 8. One thing you’ve gotta say about Armitage: he always looks like he’s enjoying the heck out of kissing.

Seeing Claude Becker on screen only intensified this desire. Perhaps paradoxically — in that Becker is even slightly of a caricature than Kenneth was, a step backward, so to speak. But he has a real face (although, after several viewings, I’m not convinced he has all of Armitage’s real hair). He wears (except for one or two scenes) real clothing. I can see real wrinkles. He’s not a fully realized person. But he is enough of one that he makes me hungry for more: reality, verisimilitude, humanity. Not a hero, not a villain. A human working through the same problems we all work through. Lucas North, John Porter, John Mulligan, John Standring, and even Tornado Gary had these problems and in different ways, both Chop and Claude Becker reminded me that we used to see Armitage regularly as a normal human and that we used to identify with those characters and their problems.

Armitage said in the Paris interviews recently that when he picks a character he prefers someone much better than him (he said this quite a while ago, too) or worse because people like him are boring. I can’t venture to say whether his self-assessment is true; but I don’t think that real people are boring. I know those multi-faceted dramatic roles are hard to come by and a long stint as a genre character or even a franchise may be necessary for him to obtain possibilities. But I hope, if they come along, he doesn’t reject them only because they aren’t sufficiently heroic or villainous, or because they are too much like him.

Because one thing I do know about real people: their mutability, their indeterminate endings, their sense that their life does not serve only one purpose call forth my emotions and identifications in a way that it’s hard for a genre character to do. This is not to criticize genre characters so much as to point out that one task of drama is to help us deal cathartically with our real lives as they are, not only as they exist in our fantasies. I would welcome it if Armitage were able to return to more of that kind of activity.

~ by Servetus on June 16, 2018.