#just because he can’t do an American accent and doesn’t have Emmys doesn’t mean i didn’t deserve to see him do this | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

leepace71 · 4 years

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When Pedro Pascal was roughly 4 years old, he and his family went to see the 1978 hit movie “Superman,” starring Christopher Reeve. Pascal’s young parents had come to live in San Antonio after fleeing their native Chile during the rise of dictator Augusto Pinochet in the mid-1970s. Taking Pascal and his older sister to the movies — sometimes more than once a week — had become a kind of family ritual, a way to soak up as much American pop culture as possible.At some point during this particular visit, Pascal needed to go to the bathroom, and his parents let him go by himself. “I didn’t really know how to read yet,” Pascal says with the same Cheshire grin that dazzled “Game of Thrones” fans during his run as the wily (and doomed) Oberyn Martel. “I did not find my way back to ‘Superman.'”

Instead, Pascal wandered into a different theater (he thinks it was showing the 1979 domestic drama “Kramer vs. Kramer,” but, again, he was 4). In his shock and bewilderment at being lost, he curled up into an open seat and fell asleep. When he woke up, the movie was over, the theater was empty, and his parents were standing over him. To his surprise, they seemed rather calm, but another detail sticks out even more.

“I know that they finished their movie,” he says, bending over in laughter. “My sister was trying to get a rise out of me by telling me, ‘This happened and that happened and then Superman did this and then, you know, the earthquake and spinning around the planet.'” In the face of such relentless sibling mockery, Pascal did the only logical thing: “I said, ‘All that happened in my movie too.'”

He had no way of knowing it at the time, of course, but some 40 years later, Pascal would in fact get the chance to star in a movie alongside a DC Comics superhero — not to mention battle Stormtroopers and, er, face off against the most formidable warrior in Westeros. After his breakout on “Game of Thrones,” he became an instant get-me-that-guy sensation, mostly as headstrong, taciturn men of action — from chasing drug traffickers in Colombia for three seasons on Netflix’s “Narcos” to squaring off against Denzel Washington in “The Equalizer 2.”

This year, though, Pascal finds himself poised for the kind of marquee career he’s spent a lifetime dreaming about. On Oct. 30, he’ll return for Season 2 as the title star of “The Mandalorian,” Lucasfilm’s light-speed hit “Star Wars” series for Disney Plus that earned 15 Emmy nominations, including best drama, in its first season. And then on Dec. 25 — COVID-19 depending — he’ll play the slippery comic book villain Maxwell Lord opposite Gal Gadot, Chris Pine and Kristen Wiig in “Wonder Woman 1984.”

The roles are at once wildly divergent and the best showcase yet for Pascal’s elastic talents. In “The Mandalorian,” he must hide his face — and, in some episodes, his whole body — in a performance that pushes minimalism and restraint to an almost ascetic ideal. In “Wonder Woman 1984,” by stark contrast, he is delivering the kind of big, broad bad-guy character that populated the 1980s popcorn spectaculars of his youth.

“I continually am so surprised when everybody pegs him as such a serious guy,” says “Wonder Woman 1984” director Patty Jenkins. “I have to say, Pedro is one of the most appealing people I have known. He instantly becomes someone that everybody invites over and you want to have around and you want to talk to.”

Talk with Pascal for just five minutes — even when he’s stuck in his car because he ran out of time running errands before his flight to make it to the set of a Nicolas Cage movie in Budapest — and you get an immediate sense of what Jenkins is talking about. Before our interview really starts, Pascal points out, via Zoom, that my dog is licking his nether regions in the background. “Don’t stop him!” he says with an almost naughty reproach. “Let him live his life!”

Over our three such conversations, it’s also clear that Pascal’s great good humor and charm have been at once ballast for a number of striking hardships, and a bulwark that makes his hard-won success a challenge for him to fully accept.

Before Pascal knew anything about “The Mandalorian,” its showrunner and executive producer Jon Favreau knew he wanted Pascal to star in it.

“He feels very much like a classic movie star in his charm and his delivery,” says Favreau. “And he’s somebody who takes his craft very seriously.” Favreau felt Pascal had the presence and skill essential to deliver a character — named Din Djarin, but mostly called Mando — who spends virtually every second of his time on screen wearing a helmet, part of the sacrosanct creed of the Mandalorian order.

Convincing any actor to hide their face for the run of a series can be as precarious as escaping a Sarlacc pit. To win Pascal over in their initial meeting, Favreau brought him behind the “Mandalorian” curtain, into a conference room papered with storyboards covering the arc of the first season. “When he walked in, it must have felt a little surreal,” Favreau says. “You know, most of your experiences as an actor, people are kicking the tires to see if it’s a good fit. But in this case, everything was locked and loaded.”

Needless to say, it worked. “I hope this doesn’t sound like me fashioning myself like I’m, you know, so smart, but I agreed to do this [show] because the impression I had when I had my first meeting was that this is the next big s—,” Pascal says with a laugh.

Favreau’s determination to cast Pascal, however, put the actor in a tricky situation: Pascal’s own commitments to make “Wonder Woman 1984” in London and to perform in a Broadway run of “King Lear” with Glenda Jackson barreled right into the production schedule for “The Mandalorian.” Some scenes on the show, and in at least one case a full episode, would need to lean on the anonymity of the title character more than anyone had quite planned, with two stunt performers — Brendan Wayne and Lateef Crowder — playing Mando on set and Pascal dubbing in the dialogue months later.

Pascal was already being asked to smother one of his best tools as an actor, extraordinarily uncommon for anyone shouldering the newest iteration of a global live-action franchise. (Imagine Robert Downey Jr. only playing Iron Man while wearing a mask — you can’t!) Now he had to hand over control of Mando’s body to other performers too. Some actors would have walked away. Pascal didn’t.

“If there were more than just a couple of pages of a one-on-one scene, I did feel uneasy about not, in some instances, being able to totally author that,” he says. “But it was so easy in such a sort of practical and unexciting way for it to be up to them. When you’re dealing with a franchise as large as this, you are such a passenger to however they’re going to carve it out. It’s just so specific. It’s ‘Star Wars.'” (For Season 2, Pascal says he was on the set far more, though he still sat out many of Mando’s stunts.)

“The Mandalorian” was indeed the next big s—, helping to catapult the launch of Disney Plus to 26.5 million subscribers in its first six weeks. With the “Star Wars” movies frozen in carbonite until 2023 (at least), I noted offhand that he’s now effectively the face of one of the biggest pop-culture franchises in the world. Pascal could barely suppress rolling his eyes.

“I mean, come on, there isn’t a face!” he says with a laugh that feels maybe a little forced. “If you want to say, ‘You’re the silhouette’ — which is also a team effort — then, yeah.” He pauses. “Can we just cut the s— and talk about the Child?”

Yes, of course, the Child — or, as the rest of the galaxy calls it, Baby Yoda. Pascal first saw the incandescently cute creature during his download of “Mandalorian” storyboards in that initial meeting with Favreau. “Literally, my eyes following left to right, up and down, and, boom, Baby Yoda close to the end of the first episode,” he says. “That was when I was like, ‘Oh, yep, that’s a winner!'”

Baby Yoda is undeniably the breakout star of “The Mandalorian,” inspiring infinite memes and apocryphal basketball game sightings. But the show wouldn’t work if audiences weren’t invested in Mando’s evolving emotional connection to the wee scene stealer, something Favreau says Pascal understood from the jump. “He’s tracking the arc of that relationship,” says the showrunner. “His insight has made us rethink moments over the course of the show.” (As with all things “Star Wars,” questions about specifics are deflected in deference to the all-powerful Galactic Order of Spoilers.)

Even if Pascal couldn’t always be inside Mando’s body, he never left the character’s head, always aware of how this orphaned bounty hunter who caroms from planet to planet would look askance at anything that felt too good (or too adorable) to be true.

“The transience is something that I’m incredibly familiar with, you know?” Pascal says. “Understanding the opportunity for complexity under all of the armor was not hard for me.”

When Pascal was 4 months old, his parents had to leave him and his sister with their aunt, so they could go into hiding to avoid capture during Pinochet’s crackdown against his opposition. After six months, they finally managed to climb the walls of the Venezuelan embassy during a shift change and claim asylum; from there, the family relocated, first to Denmark, then to San Antonio, where Pascal’s father got a job as a physician.

Pascal was too young to remember any of this, and for a healthy stretch of his childhood, his complicated Chilean heritage sat in parallel to his life in the U.S. — separate tracks, equally important, never quite intersecting. By the time Pascal was 8, his family was able to take regular trips back to Chile to visit with his 34 first cousins. But he doesn’t remember really talking about any of his time there all that much with his American friends.

“I remember at one point not even realizing that my parents had accents until a friend was like, ‘Why does your mom talk like that?'” Pascal says. “And I remember thinking, like what?”

Besides, he loved his life in San Antonio. His father took him and his sister to Spurs basketball games during the week if their homework was done. He hoodwinked his mother into letting him see “Poltergeist” at the local multiplex. He watched just about anything on cable; the HBO special of Whoopi Goldberg’s one-woman Broadway show knocked him flat. He remembers seeing Henry Thomas in “E.T.” and Christian Bale in “Empire of the Sun” and wishing ardently, urgently, I want to live those stories too.

Then his father got a job in Orange County, Calif. After Pascal finished the fifth grade, they moved there. It was a shock. “There were two really, really rough years,” he says. “A lot of bullying.”

His mother found him a nascent performing arts high school in the area, and Pascal burrowed even further into his obsessions, devouring any play or movie he could get his hands on. His senior year, a friend of his mother’s gave Pascal her ticket to a long two-part play running in downtown Los Angeles that her bad back couldn’t withstand. He got out of school early to drive there by himself. It was the pre-Broadway run of “Angels in America.”

“And it changed me,” he says with almost religious awe. “It changed me.”

After studying acting at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Pascal booked a succession of solid gigs, like MTV’s “Undressed” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” But the sudden death of his mother — who’d only just been permitted to move back to Chile a few years earlier — took the wind right from Pascal’s sails. He lost his agent, and his career stalled almost completely.

As a tribute to her, he decided to change his professional last name from Balmaceda, his father’s, to Pascal, his mother’s. “And also, because Americans had such a hard time pronouncing Balmaceda,” he says. “It was exhausting.”

Pascal even tried swapping out Pedro for Alexander (an homage to Ingmar Bergman’s “Fanny and Alexander,” one of the formative films of his youth). “I was willing to do absolutely anything to work more,” he says. “And that meant if people felt confused by who they were looking at in the casting room because his first name was Pedro, then I’ll change that. It didn’t work.”

It was a desperately lean time for Pascal. He booked an occasional “Law & Order” episode, but mostly he was pounding the pavement along with his other New York theater friends — like Oscar Isaac, who met Pascal doing an Off Broadway play. They became fast, lifelong friends, bonding over their shared passions and frustrations as actors.

“It’s gotten better, but at that point, it was so easy to be pigeonholed in very specific roles because we’re Latinos,” says Isaac. “It’s like, how many gang member roles am I going to be sent?” As with so many actors, the dream Pascal and Isaac shared to live the stories of their childhoods had been stripped down to its most basic utility. “The dream was to be able to pay rent,” says Isaac. “There wasn’t a strategy. We were just struggling. It was talking about how to do this thing that we both love but seems kind of insurmountable.”

As with so few actors, that dream was finally rekindled through sheer nerve and the luck of who you know, when another lifelong friend, actor Sarah Paulson, agreed to pass along Pascal’s audition for Oberyn Martell to her best friend Amanda Peet, who is married to “Game of Thrones” co-showrunner David Benioff.

“First of all, it was an iPhone selfie audition, which was unusual,” Benioff remembers over email. “And this wasn’t one of the new-fangled iPhones with the fancy cameras. It looked like s—; it was shot vertical; the whole thing was very amateurish. Except for the performance, which was intense and believable and just right.”

Before Pascal knew it, he found himself in Belfast, sitting inside the Great Hall of the Red Keep as one of the judges at Tyrion Lannister’s trial for the murder of King Joffrey. “I was between Charles Dance and Lena Headey, with a view of the entire f—ing set,” Pascal says, his eyes wide and astonished still at the memory. “I couldn’t believe I didn’t have an uncomfortable costume on. You know, I got to sit — and with this view.” He sighs. “It strangely aligned itself with the kind of thinking I was developing as a child that, at that point, I was convinced was not happening.”

And then it all started to happen.

In early 2018, while Pascal was in Hawaii preparing to make the Netflix thriller “Triple Frontier” — opposite his old friend Isaac — he got a call from the film’s producer Charles Roven, who told him Patty Jenkins wanted to meet with him in London to discuss a role in another film Roven was producing, “Wonder Woman 1984.”

“It was a f—ing offer,” Pascal says in an incredulous whisper. “I wasn’t really grasping that Patty wanted to talk to me about a part that I was going to play, not a part that I needed to get. I wasn’t able to totally accept that.”

Pascal had actually shot a TV pilot with Jenkins that wasn’t picked up, made right before his life-changing run on “Game of Thrones” aired. “I got to work with Patty for three days or something and then thought I’d never see her again,�� he says. “I didn’t even know she remembered me from that.”

She did. “I worked with him, so I knew him,” she says. “I didn’t need him to prove anything for me. I just loved the idea of him, and I thought he would be kind of unexpected, because he doesn’t scream ‘villain.'”

In Jenkins’ vision, Max Lord — a longstanding DC Comics rogue who shares a particularly tangled history with Wonder Woman — is a slick, self-styled tycoon with a knack for manipulation and an undercurrent of genuine pathos. It was the kind of larger-than-life character Pascal had never been asked to tackle before, so he did something equally unorthodox: He transformed his script into a kind of pop-art scrapbook, filled with blown-up photocopies of Max Lord from the comic books that Pascal then manipulated through his lens on the character.

Even the few pages Pascal flashes to me over Zoom are quite revealing. One, featuring Max sporting a power suit and a smarmy grin, has several burned-out holes, including through the character’s eye. Another page features Max surrounded by text bubbles into which Pascal has written, over and over and over again in itty-bitty lettering, “You are a f—ing piece of s—.”

“I felt like I had wake myself up again in a big way,” he says. “This was just a practical way of, like, instead of going home tired and putting Netflix on, [I would] actually deal with this physical thing, doodle and think about it and run it.”

Jenkins is so bullish on Pascal’s performance that she thinks it could explode his career in the same way her 2003 film “Monster” forever changed how the industry saw Charlize Theron. “I would never cast him as just the stoic, quiet guy,” Jenkins says. “I almost think he’s unrecognizable from ‘Narcos’ to ‘Wonder Woman.’ Wouldn’t even know that was the same guy. But I think that may change.”

When people can see “Wonder Woman 1984” remains caught in the chaos the pandemic has wreaked on the industry; both Pascal and Jenkins are hopeful the Dec. 25 release date will stick, but neither is terribly sure it will. Perhaps it’s because of that uncertainty, perhaps it’s because he’s spent his life on the outside of a dream he’s now suddenly living, but Pascal does not share Jenkins’ optimism that his experience making “Wonder Woman 1984” will open doors to more opportunities like it.

“It will never happen again,” Pascal says, once more in that incredulous whisper. “It felt so special.”

After all he’s done in a few short years, why wouldn’t Pascal think more roles like this are on his horizon?

“I don’t know!” he finally says with a playful — and pointed — howl. “I’m protecting myself psychologically! It’s just all too good to be true! How dare I!”

#pedro pascal #variety #interview

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wearevillaneve · 4 years

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I never saw this show exceeding past 5 seasons max. Jodie is taking advantage of her youth and whiteness/white privilege whether she likes to realize it or not. It’s not a shade or diss to her either honestly it is what it is. She knows she’s the 20 something pretty white actress from killing Eve & she wants to go into the film industry. Sandra is gorgeous & talented too but she’s older & Hollywood isn’t as kind & generous to older women especially POC women. I wanna see her in more films tho

But you’re not going to see Sandra Oh in more films. You know that, right?

It’s not because she’s not good enough. Sandra is a transcendent talent, but she has been cursed with the great misfortune by her parents. They effed her up from the beginning. They didn’t make her White. Or a hot blond with more curves than the Pacific Coast Highway. She checks none of the boxes of what a leading lady in Hollywood

When you’re none of those things, you don’t get to play the lead in Oscar-bait films. Nobody is paring Oh up with Ryan Reynolds, Ben Affleck or Matt Damon or any other leading (White) man. Nobody who is spending hundreds of millions on tentpole summer movies is going to give women who look like Oh opportunities to play those kind of gigs.

Those gigs are reserved for other women. Women who look like Jodie Comer. This is not debatable. Sandra gets to play the “ethnic, but sassy” best friend of the White lead. That’s her lane as far as Hollywood is concerned. Asian women do not get to see their names above the title in Hollywood, which could be why it took a British woman adapting a novella by a British writer of a British MI5 agent who obviously was White to cast as its star someone who was neither White or British. On Grey’s Anatomy, Oh became a star, but never was the star. Ellen Pompeo was and is, as one might expect of the titular character of a show (with a notable exception I will address in a separate post). Pompeo is considered one of the more progressive actresses in Hollywood with a Black husband, biracial kids and a $20 million annual salary, but even she is not inoculated from being occasionally clueless.

Speaking on a podcast, Pompeo said about Oh who left Grey’s in 2014, "Sandra is a different kind of actor. … You never doubt whether Sandra Oh is gonna work again, right? She’ll work forever, right? But for me, I had to think, 'Am I gonna work again? Or am I going to be so typecast?' ”

What. The. Entire. FUCK.

If you ever needed evidence that TV BFF’s don’t know shit about each other away from the camera, this is Exhibit A. Hooray for Ellen P. for getting paid and all that, but she simply sounds stupid when she says Oh is going to “work forever” when in fact she barely worked at all for four years after she hung up her scrubs.

For four years after she left Grey’s Anatomy, Sandra Oh waited. She waited for offers to come in, juicy scripts that could come alive in the hands of her Golden Globe–winning talent. Sure, she did acting work here and there; a lead turn in the indie Catfight, a cheeky supporting role in the comedy Tammy, an arc in the drama series American Crime, a few plays. But there was nothing on the scale of Cristina Yang, the sarcastic surgeon she played on Grey’s for nearly a decade—a standout performance that turned the Korean-Canadian actress into a household name, and earned her five Emmy nominations in a row. The lack of certain offers was, Oh says, heartbreaking at the time.

These days, though, the deeply pragmatic actress says she’s letting go of expectations: “That’s where I’m at. I can talk about the things that didn’t come my way that I think should come my way, but it’s just like—it’s a fuckin’ waste of time.” Besides, her four-year waiting spell eventually led to Killing Eve, a BBC America thriller premiering Sunday about a bored MI5 operative named Eve Polastri—played by Oh—who becomes obsessed with hunting down a psychotic assassin named Villanelle.

I have not worked with, nor have I ever met Ms. Oh, and I certainly do not earn anything close to $20 million a year, but if my broke Black ass knows that Sandra was indeed concerned she might not work again in the industry, what’s Pompeo’s bullshit excuse (That was a rhetorical question. There is no excuse)?

I am confused by what you mean by Jodie taking advantage of her youth and Whiteness/White Privilege. What is she supposed to do? Pass on film roles and say, “I don’t believe I should take these jobs until there is equity in opportunity for women who don’t look like me.”

Comer will never say that. Nor should she be expected to. It’s not her responsibility, nor is it within her power to be such a change agent. She’s a working actress with a window of opportunity, and while better off financially than 99.9 percent of her fans, has not made so much money as to be financially set for life. Between Jodie C. and Sandra O. who’s more likely to join Ellen P. in the $20 million a year club?

Benefiting from being born White isn’t an original sin conceived by Comer. It predates her. Today, she may be aware the pie isn’t sliced evenly between herself and Oh, but it wasn’t for Rebel Wilson either because of how she is viewed by the world.

Consider how Wilson’s 2020 ‘Year of Health” weight loss affects her personal wellness (likely an improvement), but may impact her career opportunities and probably drastically change them when she’s no longer “Fat Amy” and instead “Fun-Sized Amy.” Sandra knows this game. She was not being prescient when she mused, “A lot of things that I can't get into the room for, even just to be seen, is because they're just saying 'No. they're not casting non-white.' You're lumped into a category with people who are just not white.” She was merely being accurate. Jodie does not get lumped into those categories. Looking the way she does means more that how she acts, which is not shading her skills as much as it is recognizing her baked-in advantages. She’s paid her dues and had her setbacks and disappointments, but it would be silly to ever suggest she’s had as tough a time with a Scouse accent as someone else has with a Korean heritage.

Nothing could be further from the truth to suggest anyone is dumping on J.C. for being young, blonde and pretty or trivializing her life struggles, but her blues ain’t the same as Sandra’s and never will be. Those future movie roles you are hoping for may happen for Sandra. They could happen. They should happen. Will they happen?

No. No, they will not. Talent is not enough because all the talent in the world has ever been enough to make this mean and discriminatory world a meritocracy. Never has in the past and it doesn’t seem about to change anytime soon in the future. Now you know what Sandra already does.

#Sandra Oh #Jodie Comer #Killing Eve #grey's anatomy #ellen pompeo #talent is not enough #rebel wilson #life's not fair #meritocracy is a myth

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mimzy-writing-online · 5 years

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A Witch’s Memory, Chapter Two, Anna

I can feel Felix’s stress bleeding into the soul connection. I think that’s what woke me up. It’s seven, which shouldn’t feel as painfully early as it does, but I don’t sleep. Just because classes start tomorrow, doesn’t mean I have my sleep schedule back in rhythm.

Might not ever.

I bet Veronica’s already stressing herself out and it’s bleeding into the rest of the house. That must be why Felix is so stressed. Wonderful. Great.

At least there’s tea and pancakes. Elmsley promised.

I can hear three sets of feet hurrying around downstairs as I leave my room. The door to Emily’s room is closed.

“Felix, I need you to write your name on which boxes are yours. You and Anna both forgot.”

I knock on Emily’s door, avoiding all the glittery drawings taped to it, color on the dingy old wood. “Emmy, are you okay?” She’s an empath, she can probably feel the stress downstairs from up here.

The door opens a crack and Emily peeks through. “I don’t feel good,” she whispers. She’s still in her pajamas and her long braid is falling apart.

“Can I come in?”

The door opens for me.

“How do you feel?” I ask.

She makes a face, nose wrinkled and everything. “Everything in my chest feels like it’s squeezing. Everyone’s too…” She frowns. “I don’t have the right word. It’s like humming but really loud and painful. Everyone’s humming too loud, especially Mummy.”

“I think the word for that is either stressed or anxious, maybe both. It’s okay, Mummy will feel better when we’re in the car and moving in.”

“Which will be when?” she asks with the sort of tired cynicism I usually have but concentrated into one seven-year-old.

“I don’t know, but why don’t you get dressed. Uncle promised pancakes before we drive to school.”

Her eyes widen a little, excitement pouring in.

Some moonchildren, when they’re old enough, can radiate their emotions, like an aura. I wonder if she’ll develop that ability too.

I leave her to it, shutting her door tight and heading downstairs. Veronica’s surrounded by boxes, hunched over a clipboard, pulling at her frizzed out curls and making them an even bigger mess. Felix jumps over a pile of boxes and stands over her shoulder. He’s a giant compared to her, she’s tiny. They look the same though, have the same nervous habits when they’re anxious, the same messy, inky hair and the same pale green eyes.

And sometimes I forget she’s his aunt and not his mom.

The photo Veronica and Felix’s mom together is haunting sometimes.

“Did you make sure all your uniforms were washed before you packed them?”

“Yes Auntie.”

“And all your bedding is packed?”

“Yes Auntie.”

Then she sees me, moves in on me and makes me explain where I packed everything, help her count uniforms, make sure I didn’t forget hygiene stuff, and reorganize my box of magic supplies.

“I definitely have everything, and if I don’t have everything, I’ll be back the next weekend to grab it. It’s boarding school, not war.” The sarcastic edge at the end…

…backfires so bad. Veronica is shaking. Was she always shaking, or did I do that? I don’t know if she’s going to cry or have a panic attack. What was I thinking?

“No, it’s fine Auntie, it’s not that bad. You’re doing a good job,” I say.

Elmsley’s next to her in a second. “Come on dear, let’s go outside for a moment,” he says gently as he takes her hand and leads her away.

I lean against the wall and sink down to the floor, my head in my hands. “I can’t do this.”

Felix walks up and nudges my shoulder with his smelly socked foot. “Chill out dude,” he says. I laugh. Since we moved, he’s been using as much 90’s American movie slang as he can, but there’s no way you can say those words with such a nice English accent and not sound ridiculous.

“Chill,” I mumble back. It sounds better when I say it, with my almost-American accent.

“We can totally chill later, bro,” Felix mumbles, cracking up with laughter.

I press my hand to my face, trying not to laugh. “Fe, no,” I whine.

“What’s wrong bro?”

“Shut up.”

“Just trying to have a chill conversation, bro.”

“Felix, no.”

“Fine,” he agrees, toeing my shoulder again, “but do you at least feel better?”

I look up at him and smirk. “When has you being an idiot failed to make me laugh?”

“Absolutely never,” he says with confidence.

Somehow everything works out. All the boxes and suitcases make it past Veronica’s final inspection and gets loaded into the SUV. Pancakes and tea are obtained through one local diner. Nothing bad happens. We make it to the school. We carry boxes and boxes and bedding and suitcases into two separate dormitories.

“Boarding school looks so fun,” Emily says as she bounds across the large field outside the dormitory buildings. Over small sloped hills and behind trees and over momentarily unattended boxes she goes. She runs to where the rest of us are standing in the shade and plants herself at Veronica’s side. “Mummy, when do I get to go to boarding school?”

“When you’re twelve.”

Emily frowns and starts counting on her fingers. “That’s five years away!”

Felix picks her up. “Trust me Emmy, primary school is far better than secondary school. We don’t even get playtime; we just go to our next class.”

“That’s not good,” she mumbles, rethinking this whole boarding school thing.

“We also have to spend an hour on mathematics every day and then do even more maths homework after class,” I add evilly.

Her frown deepens and she squirms out of Felix’s arms until he puts her down. “No, I’ve decided I’m never going to secondary school. I will drop out and become an actress like Anna?”

“Wait, what?”—Veronica.

“Who told you dropping out was an option?”—Elmsley.

Of course this is the very moment they would decide to tune into the conversation, right when Emily says something incriminating.

Again.

“What is all this about dropping out?” Elmsley asks, looking between the three of us.

“Anna,” Emily chirps. “Last year she told me she was going to drop out of school and become an actress so she wouldn’t have to take those big exams she was freaked out about.”

Everyone stares at me.

“Obviously I was joking!” They stare at me, eyebrows raised. “She takes me literally all the time.”

Emily nudges Felix’s leg. “Mummy and Daddy aren’t very happy with Anna.”

Elmsley sighs and looks at Veronica, having another silent conversation before he says, “we should get going.”

Yes, please. I want to go back to my dorm and unpack.

Emily leaps into a hug, both legs wrapped around one of mine, arms clinging to me. I stumble, clutching her close in case she lets go too soon. “I’m not tall enough for you to Tarzan on. Go Tarzan Felix.”

Emily is, as always, very easy to point onto a path of mischief. Felix yelps and falls back, hitting his back on the grass and dirt as Emily giggles. Elmsley and Veronica give tired parental sighs and collect their monkey daughter off of Felix.

“Bye Anna! Bye Felix! Bye-bye boarding school I’m never, ever going to.”

“You still have to go to secondary school, no matter what nonsense Anna tells you,” Elmsley tells her.

“I was joking!”

But they’re walking away now.

“She’s seven and, unlike you, the rest of us weren’t born automatically understanding sarcasm as a second language.”

“First language, actually.”

Hi, thank you for reading this far. Please feel free to reblog, comment, or like. I would love any of those things. I really want to get myself out there and share my developing story. If you want to join my tag list just comment, I would love to add you!

[Image description: Moodboard banner. Top Left: two lane road in autumn with orange and yellow leaves on the ground and road. Center Left: Bookshelves with old brown hardback books and small bottles with potion ingredients. Bottom Left: A pile of straw broomsticks. Top Center: Table in a cafe with a cup of tea, a red tea pot, and an open book. Center photo: A girl with copper red hair wearing her hair in a loose bun and keeping her back to the camera. Bottom Center: Closed window with decorative window panes and a set of hands pressed against them. Top Right: Three magic wands placed side by side on a wooden table, all three have different styles. Center Right: Two bookshelves filled with old, faded hardback books. Bottom Right: A desk in front of a window with a cup of tea, several books, four lit candles, and a pair of glasses. End of image description]

Tag List: @jacquilich

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janiedean · 6 years

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Anyone who think Kit is a good actor is an idiot. And there's so many of them. That's why the world is getting worse and will be dominated by robots 🤖

oddmy dearest @the-bitter-gremlin hopefully you’ll get the tag because I really wanna make sure you see this reply :’DDDDDD

now, point the first: thanks for calling me an idiot! :D I mean, okay, not that grades mean anything of course but given that I went as far as graduating HS in the top five of my class, that I have two degrees one of which with the highest possible vote in a field that’s technically not too easy and that it’s even certified that I speak at least one language at native-tongue level and I can get by in two others other than mine I think my brain is fine enough, thank you.

I also watched more movies than the average person (no, I did, really, I considered studying cinema instead of going to proper uni for real), my top ten favorite movies is all stuff made before the nineties except for one and all my favorite actors are Certified Good Actors Like For Real and I got called a snob for my movie/actor taste more times than I can count. the only reason I’m doing this long-ass preamble is to inform you that if someone can’t act, I can recognize it and I have absolutely no problem admitting it even if it’s someone I like as a person or whose work I enjoy. for one, I can 100% admit that my favorite italian actor when he was nine back then was pretty atrocious (he got better admittedly but I haven’t followed him in a while, so who cares), and I still enjoyed his movies anyway even if he was terrible and I even knew it, but hey, he was hot, so who cares, right? and I enjoyed a fair amount of horribly acted italian fiction because it was fun, so really, I don’t have anything to lose here.

this was all a long preamble to tell you that yes, my favorite actor is marlon brando not the first idiot passing off the street, and yes, kit is actually good at what he does and no, people are not idiots for thinking that.

now, never mind that idek if you saw him in anything that’s not GOT, but the only movie of his I’ve seen where he was really meh was the spy movie and that was because the entire plot sucked ass and the character was terrible but everything was terrible. for the rest, he certainly pulled a better american accent than half of the british actors I’ve heard (it was brimstone by the way, excellent movie, watch it), he can do comedy (watch seven days in hell :D) and ah, yeah, he’s just making a movie/finishing a movie with xavier dolan who’s like… not someone known for picking bad actors. also, uuuh, he went to school for that actually, but not just anywhere -

ah, wow, HE WENT TO THE SAME SCHOOL WHERE LAURENCE OLIVIER, VANESSA REDGRAVE AND JUDI DENCH WENT but okay, sure, they’d totally take someone talentless according to them? and actually:

In the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise the majority of Central’s submission was judged “world leading” or “internationally excellent”. The school has been ranked highly by The Guardian, placing it sixth in its league table of specialist institutions[9]and ninth for Drama and Dance.

LOOK AT THAT, TOP-NOTCH SCHOOL.

now, what is that british acting schools prepare people for? theater.

which means that he’s a theater actor first and foremost, which shows in his damned acting because if you notice he does half of it with his voice, but I guess you were too busy thinking he’s too good-looking to act, right?

except that not counting theater stuff, GOT was the first job he had *and* his first job on tv, which means that of course he wasn’t as good as the others in the beginning, because a) acting for the theater and for tv aren’t the same, b) it was his first job and not everyone is named leonardo dicaprio and can act their way out of a what’s eating gilbert grape at seventeen.

thing is: while at least one of his co-stars hasn’t improved in the role they have (imo but it’s also the writing) and most of the others GOT actors are either seasoned professionals or had acted for the camera before and had less issues adapting to it, he actually got better, and he actually acted a lot better when he was feeding off other people. case in turn:

youtube

that’s jon and jaime in s1. admittedly, not kit’s best effort unless you interpret it as jon being so lovestruck by jaime being around him that he’s like 404 page not found, and he had one scene with NCW from then until S7, and they didn’t even interact. NCW is miles better than he is here, obviously, but like, NCW has been in the job since the early 90s and I assure you his first danish movie isn’t his best acting effort either even if it’s not bad. BUT, let’s go to another S1 scene:

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jon and sam discuss sex, yey! here he’s with a guy - john bradely - who’s probably (at this point) better than him at reciting on screen, but with whom he’s had a lot more scenes and that is playing his best friend and with whom he presumably hung out a lot and with whom he’s had a lot of time to work with. and even if it’s still S1, if you look at it it’s miles better - he does a lot more of microexpressions, he never looks at the camera (first sign of bad acting btw, he didn’t do it in the previous scene either but there he looked starstruck all the time, here he doesn’t) and like, you can already see that there’s a vast difference in between the two. and it’s the same season, five episodes apart - supposedly they also filmed it later and he’s already more at ease with it.

now, small pause to remind you that at this point jon doesn’t have too much extra baggage BUT that kit actually read the damned book and you can see it because he makes very precise choices ie in the book after jon burns his hand he flexes the fingers of the hurt one every time he’s nervous or he’s about to lie or something, and he does the exact same thing (link here btw), and fyi, with the exception of partially alfie and gwen, no one in the cast actually went as far as that so HAHAHAHAHA WOW SUCH BAD ACTING, INNIT? anyway, that was season one. I’ll spare you and myself S2/¾ also because if I link you the jon/ygritte scenes I’ll shoot myself in the head. instead, let’s go to season five and 5x02, as in the season where I literally would have quit the fucking show if it wasn’t for jon’s storyline.

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if you look at this, he doesn’t even say a fucking word until the ending, and you can see exactly what he’s thinking just looking at his damned face, because if you pay even the slightest bit of attention you notice that he changes expression minutely with every damned word sam and thorne say, you can see his eye movements, then he goes from complete sour to sad to angry to surprised to delighted to worried to happy again in the span of four minutes without even talking once and it’s miles better than anything he did in S1.

or you could also rewatch the scene where he punches ramsay in S6 where he does a lot of microexpressions that speak for him without even talking, again, in an episode where he did all the stunts on his own same as the rest of the show, and that’s really not little given all the work it goes into being, uh, the main character, who also happens to have to be a seasoned fighter and use swords and so on. (I can’t link but I think I exhausted my limit for linking videos on tumblr so whatever *SHRUG*)

guess what: HE IMPROVED. GREATLY. IT SHOWS. learn to watch the damned thing, it doesn’t take going beyond GOT to realize it. and now, two last things I have to say to you before I finish this because I honestly wasted too much time on you already.

one: he might not be the best actor around - fair enough -, but kit’s definitely good imo. not passable, not decent, not average - he’s good. and he’s learning and he’s improved tremendously in the last eight years and it shows, and he put enough effort into this role to a) read the canon, b) incorporate the canon into it, c) actually changing scenes so that they fit canon more, d) do all his own stunts, e) carry 60% of this whole damned liver-destroying show on his shoulders since at least S5 in which his sl was the only saving grace of the entire thing and he executed it perfectly, so kindly fuck off and don’t go to people calling them idiots because they think an actor is good.

(ps: I

two: going into people’s askboxes and calling them idiots because they enjoy something and insulting what they enjoy is a) rude, b) uncalled for, c) an asshole move.

next time let me/us/whoever enjoy this guys’ acting in peace and keep your fucking opinion to yourself, because honest, if I could spend twenty years out of almost thirty of my life keeping my mouth shout about how much I hate HP to a) my rl friends, b) my internet friends and I could keep myself from informing them that I think it’s really bad under their posts or in their inbox or to their face because I’d be an asshole if I decided to shit on what they like, then you can pay me the same favor (or about anyone else) and not go around dissing stuff people like to their faces when they said openly they like them.

sayonara and call me when you get an emmy nomination :’)

#kit harington #tagging bc I have a feeling it might be relevant #dskljgklsdg #ch: jon snow #game of thrones cast #is2g y'all were raised not even by wolves #wolves would be more polite #like shut the hell up man #REALLY shut the hell up #@ anyone else: IF YOU DON'T LIKE KIT FINE FOR YOU I DON'T CARE I DON'T NEED TO KNOW #thanks very much #blergh #extra wank for ts #the-bitter-gremlin #ask post

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papermoonloveslucy · 7 years

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LUCY, THE AMERICAN MOTHER

S3;E7 ~ October 26, 1970

Directed by Jack Donohue ~ Written by Lou Derman and Larry Rhine

Synopsis

For a class project, Craig is doing a documentary film about Lucy. When Kim's boyfriend wins a $100 cash prize at school, Lucy frantically tracks it down to the local library where Craig and Harry are filming her every move.

Regular Cast

Lucille Ball (Lucy Carter), Gale Gordon (Harrison Otis Carter), Desi Arnaz Jr. (Craig Carter), Lucie Arnaz (Kim Carter)

Guest Cast

Mary Jane Croft (Mary Jane) makes her fifth series appearance as Mary Jane. Croft played Betty Ramsey during season six of “I Love Lucy. ” She also played Cynthia Harcourt in “Lucy is Envious” (ILL S3;E23) and Evelyn Bigsby in “Return Home from Europe” (ILL S5;E26). She played Audrey Simmons on “The Lucy Show” but when Lucy Carmichael moved to California, she played Mary Jane Lewis, the actor’s married name and the same one she uses on all 31 of her episodes of “Here’s Lucy. Her final acting credit was playing Midge Bowser on “Lucy Calls the President” (1977). She died in 1999 at the age of 83.

Don Crichton (Steve Bailey) makes his third and final appearances on “Here’s Lucy.” He was an Emmy nominated choreographer who worked on “The Carol Burnett Show” and “The Love Boat,” among others.

Olive Dunbar (Librarian) played a high school biology teacher in “Lucy Gets Her Diploma” (TLS S6;E5). This is her last appearances on a “Lucy” sitcom. Dunbar passed away in February 2017 at age 91.

Richard Collier (Library Assistant) was a character actor who played small roles in the musical films Bells Are Ringing (1960) and Hello, Dolly (1970). He did two episodes of “Dennis the Menace” (1963) with Gale Gordon. This is his only appearance with Lucille Ball.

Sid Gould (Man in Library #1) made more than 45 appearances on “The Lucy Show,” and nearly as many on “Here’s Lucy.” Gould (born Sydney Greenfader) was Lucille Ball’s cousin by marriage to Gary Morton.

Boyd 'Red' Morgan (Man in Library #2) is an actor and stunt man who was seen in “Lucy and John Wayne” (TLS S5;E10), with whom he did eleven films. This is the second of his four episodes of “Here’s Lucy.”

Morgan, a veteran stunt performer, was cast because the character takes a fall off of his chair.

Alma Platt (Old Lady) was born in 1891, so was 79 years old at the time of this episode. Two weeks before this episode originally aired she was seen on “Marcus Welby M.D.” on ABC and four days after this episode originally aired she was seen on NBC's “Adam 12” - meaning Platt appeared on all three major networks in October 1970. She died in 1976.

The character is only caught on screen for a moment when the camera pans to the right during the final chase scene in the library. She has no lines or business – she just sits and reads.

The woman who loses her wig in the library scene is the only actor not credited in the show.

After directing all of season one, Jack Donohue returns to “Here's Lucy” and will direct four more season three installments before leaving again only to reappear for the last six episodes of the series in season six.

In his DVD introduction to this episode, Desi Arnaz Jr. says that his parents took hundreds of hours of home movies. In 1993 Lucie Arnaz collected some of them in “Lucy & Desi: A Home Movie.”

The title of Craig's movie will be “A Day in the Life of My Mother.”

When Kim hears Craig is making a documentary about Lucy, she 'auditions' to get into the act:

She first imitates Katharine Hepburn in the 1937 film Stage Door: “The calla lilies are in bloom again, such a strange flower.” Coincidentally, Lucille Ball was also in Stage Door. The now-iconic line was actually taken from the play The Lake, one of Hepburn's rare failures.

She next imitates Maurice Chevalier singing “Louise,” a song by Leo Robin and Richard H. Whiting from the 1929 film Innocents of Paris. The song became Chevalier's signature song.

Lastly, she mimics Bette Davis saying “Peetah! Peetah! You read the letter, didn't you?” Although attributed to Davis and often spoken by Bette Davis impersonators, this exact line is not found in any of her films. In 1941's The Great Lie she does say the line “I wish to leave Pete a letter marked personal” which may be the source for the oft-imitated quote.

Lucy tells Craig she doesn't want to be filmed first thing in the morning, when she looks like the Bride of Frankenstein. The Bride of Frankenstein was a 1935 sequel film to Universal's Frankenstein that starred Elsa Lanchester as the monster's bride. Lanchester made guest starring appearances on all three “Lucy” sitcoms and it was common to use the name “bride of Frankenstein” as a punchline for jokes in all three series.

Lucie talks about having breakfast with Steve Bailey (Don Crichton). They've been out together five times. Don Crichton also played Kim's boyfriend Don in “Lucy, the Conclusion Jumper” (S1;E5).

When Craig calls “cut” on a real argument between Kim and Lucy, he takes on an exaggerated German accent, feeding into the TV trope that all directors were temperamental Germans in the style of Erich Von Stroheim (1885-1957), who was actually Austrian.

When Lucy can't seem to act natural in front of Craig's camera, she suggests he get someone else to play his mother; someone like Raquel Welch, Carol Burnett, or Don Knotts. Movie star Raquel Welch seems to be the show's go-to name to drop when wanting to reference a young female sex symbol. Carol Burnett was a great friend of Lucille Ball and the two made numerous guest appearances on each other's television programs. Don Knotts, the nervous Deputy Fife from “The Andy Griffith Show” (which filmed on the Desilu back lot) will make a guest star appearances in a 1973 episode of “Here's Lucy.”

Instead of Gale Gordon ending the episode wet, he starts it that way when he walks through the front door splattered with water from Lucy's front lawn sprinkler system.

Harry says that Lucy's daily misadventures make “Laurel and Hardy look like Sears and Roebuck.” Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy were a vaudeville and film comedy team. Lucille Ball and Gale Gordon briefly imitated them when under a hypnotic suggestion in “Lucy and Pat Collins” (TLS S5;E11). Richard Sears and Alvah Roebuck founded one of the world's largest retailers (now simply known as Sears) in 1886.

Steve says that Spooky Brown and His Electric Goose Pimples is playing at the Rock and Roll Palace.

The book that Lucie puts the mended $100 bill into is titled Kiss Me Stranger. Daphne Du Maurier wrote a book titled Kiss Me Again, Stranger in 1951. This title was chosen to be provocative when spoken to the unsuspecting patrons of the library.

After the birth of Little Ricky, the Ricardos were also avid home movie enthusiasts. Things came to a boil in “Home Movies” (ILL S3;E20).

Kim imitates Katharine Hepburn saying “The calla lilies are in bloom again.” In “Lucy's Italian Movie” (ILL S5;E23) Lucy Ricardo also imitated Hepburn saying the line to impress movie director Vittorio Philippi.

Kim also imitates Maurice Chevalier singing “Louise,” something Lucy Ricardo (and the rest of the gang did) in “The French Revue” (ILL S3;E7). Chevalier eventually appeared as himself in “Lucy Goes to Mexico” a 1958 episode of “The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour.” In that episode Lucy once again does her Chevalier impersonation singing “Louise.”

Lucy is suspicious of Steve Bailey's motives and wants to meet her “future son-in-law.” Coincidentally, that is exactly what she thought of Kim's boyfriend Don (also played by Don Crichton) in “Lucy the Conclusion Jumper” (S1;E5).

Lucy Ricardo also tore a bill in half and went to great lengths to retrieve it in “Bonus Bucks” (ILL S3;E21). The second half of this “Here’s Lucy” episode is based on “Bonus Bucks.”

Lucy Carmichael went to great lengths to retrieve five $500 dollar bills she lost at a carnival in “Lucy Misplaces $2,000” (TLS S1;E4).

The red “SILENCE” sign on the librarian's desk is the same one seen in the dorm room in the previous episode “Lucy, the Co-Ed” (S3;E5). Because the prop is used as part of a joke here, and only serves as set decoration in the dorm room, this episode may have been filmed first and aired out of sequence.

Make-up! Although Lucy comes downstairs after rolling out of bed calling herself 'the bride of Frankenstein,' she is wearing full eye make-up!

Shut the door! Harry leaves the front door open when he comes in for the second time.

Fact Check! There is no need to have a cello-taped bill “set” by placing it in a book.

Sitcom Logic Alert! Why is there a laundry cart in a library? It is clear that “Bonus Bucks” (ILL S3;E21), which was set in a laundry and featured comic business with a laundry cart, was very much on Lucille Ball's mind when filming this episode.

“Lucy, the American Mother” rates 3 Paper Hearts out of 5

This is an odd episode that doesn't quite come together cohesively. Although a bit of an homage to “Bonus Bucks” on “I Love Lucy”, the home scenes seem disconnected to the library scene, which never pays off as big as it should. Also, Craig is written to act in a very uncharacteristic way in this episode.

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