Putting on the Act...

[rachelindeed.livejournal.com]

Good morning, everyone!  Welcome to the weekend!  I've really enjoyed getting a chance to drive the DPP this week, so thank you all so much.  I will be leaving tomorrow open for people to post their own ideas, both on previous topics that they may not have gotten a chance to consider, and on new topics that may be on their minds. 

So today, let's consider a question about the wonderful actors that bring Kara and Lee to life.  What are the best things that Jamie and Katee brought to these roles?  What are their individual strengths as actors, and what is it about them that makes them work so well as a team?  What do you find most appealing and/or surprising about them when you see them in interviews, or playing other roles?  What observations about their characters have they made that you found the most striking or interesting?

P.S. ~  I'm sorry about the promised poll for Kara's middle name -- I know it must be really simple because other people post them all the time, but whenever I preview the poll I've attempted to create, it comes up unformatted and wonky.  So my apologies on that.  But thanks for all the wonderful name suggestions!  Since the election process has broken down due to my technological incompetence, I think we can hail Kara with all her middle names:  Welcome Kara Artemis Aurora Eos Tiana Fiona Orthia Airlie Euterpe Daniella Aria Nike Helen Alexis Socrata Thrace!  Long may you reign!

Comments

[kag523.livejournal.com]

Rachel,
Thanks for the AWESOME week. I didn't have time to participate as I usually do, but I loved being able to escape several boring lectures to pop in and lurk about the No_Takebacks room. Great job leading!
K :>)

[rachelindeed.livejournal.com]

Thanks! It was my pleasure, definitely :)

[rachelindeed.livejournal.com]

OK, here are some of my own thoughts on Jamie and Katee as individual actors:

The thing that strikes me most about Katee as an actress is her incredible expressiveness. Taragel once remarked that she is able to play more than one emotion at once, and that is so true ~ she can carry sadness and cynicism, anger and love, vulnerability and self-loathing all in the same look, and she needs words less than almost any other actress I've ever seen, though she certainly gets great dialogue and handles it well. In person, I'm always struck by how different she is from Kara in mannerisms and personality; it reminds me how completely Kara is a heartfelt but deliberate construction. Katee plays her so naturally that it's easy to underestimate the craft and skill involved in the performance, I think. And she does a tremendous job of pulling together all the contradictory facets of Kara into something that feels messed-up in a *real* way. Somehow, what could have come across as inconsistencies seem to gel with Kara ~ it was rare that I thought to myself: "I can't believe she would be like this." Even when I didn't like what she was doing, I almost always absolutely believed it.

(The one exception for me personally, and I realize I am in the minority here, was her New Caprica story arc. I thought everyone's emotional reactions in the dollhouse situation felt overdone and contrived, from her too-fast acceptance of the Kacey-daughter scheme to the Leoben kiss-and-kill. It just didn't pack the emotional punch it was supposed to for me; it didn't feel emotionally real.)

With Jamie Bamber, I think some of the most notable things he brought to the role of Lee (besides the arms!) were: visible intelligence and sensitivity, a nice cocktail of insecurity and underlying strength, and the kind of self-containment that's interesting rather than boring to watch. He tried to find the reality and depth in a character often classed as the most 'conventional' on the BSG main cast, and I think he succeeded beautifully. And from the beginning his two main relationships were with actors and characters (EJO and KS, Adama and Kara) who were so spectacularly strong that a lesser actor could have been overwhelmed by them, just pushed off the screen. Instead, the screen just ignites with him and Katee, and in the scenes between Lee and his father he established a sense of independence and eventually equality that was completely believable. One of the things that I love about Jamie Bamber is that he seems to care a lot about Lee and about Kara/Lee, and I think that his instincts for how to play the character led to some of Lee's best qualities: he was self-contained but not deferential, ambitious and sometimes arrogant but also honest and courageous and *human.* And very much in love. He said he played his relationship with Starbuck as one of "utter fascination," and obviously it really worked.

(One of the things I can admire intellectually but don't think worked out that well in practice was that JB was always urging the writers to try new things with Lee, and he was excited by the challenges of some of the plotlines that I think were ill-conceived and poorly written, from Black Market through Lee/Dee and the weight gain of Season Three. So kudos to him for his spirit of adventure and for bringing his A-game to new scenarios with relish, but in practice almost none of the 'surprising' twists in Lee's story worked and I wish JB hadn't encouraged them.)

So those are my initial thoughts; I may be back later to talk a bit about Jamie's accent :)

[lapsedprof.livejournal.com]

Interesting question. I've seen discussions of canon/fanon and how much the characters are a cocktail of the two - mixed in different proportions for individual imbibers, but still some blended together for those of us who spend any time sitting at this bar. (ok, enough with the tortured bar metaphor).

Ultimately, I think the actors kept the characters from slipping into cliches. I think the writers did a good job of setting up characters with great potential in Kara and Lee, but we know they tended to lose interest in them or at least clear sense of what to do with them.

To me, Katee brought her quicksilver emotional range and vulnerability (along with energy, beauty, and humor) to a character that could have ended up as just a stunt - initially attention-grabbing, but ultimately one-note. She's always "there" in the moment, or so it seems, intensely present.

Jamie brings his alert intelligence and willing embrace of the emotional messiness of being human (along with energy, beauty and humor) to the the (often thankless) traditional hero role. As with Katee and Kara, he made me care intensely about his character to the very end - even when it wasn't clear the writers still did.

And then together - liftoff! It's kind of cliche at this point to talk about their chemistry, but the energy they generate off each other is nearly visible - sometimes uncomfortably so. All that combustible energy that's captured in the tight framing enabled by their similar heights (as I write this, kag523's icon has been a case in point staring me in the face). And then too, there are the ways in which they seem compelling complementary - light and dark, curves and angles, etc. They're Paul Newman and Robert Redford/Butch and Sundance.

[rachelindeed.livejournal.com]

I'm so impressed with your observations ~ beautifully put! I think you captured Katee and Jamie's unique qualities - quicksilver emotional range and the willing embrace of the emotional messiness of being human - just about as insightfully and concisely as I've ever heard.

One question that lingers in my mind is about the hero role; many people have suggested that the "traditional hero" is boring or thankless, and I guess I'm not entirely convinced on that score. I think making virtues interesting is a dramatic challenge, but it seems like a rewarding one ~ and I'm not sure flaws are inherently *more* interesting. I guess the critique of the traditional hero is that there is no balance between virtue and vice, that it's all one-note moralism. And I do see the problem with that; but sometimes I feel that TV writers go too far in the opposite direction and write in flaws just to shock or tantalize viewers rather than because they contribute to the realistic development of the character in question. It seems to me that there is so much honest and worthwhile disagreement about what is the right thing to do or the best way to act in any given situation that any character, "conventional" or not, will come across as ambiguous. I do believe in portraying all human beings as flawed, but the flaws a character has should flow from their personality and world-view and not be one-note crises or decisions they make and then never refer to again. I think that's why I found that episodes which treated Lee as a 'hero' (Bastille Day, Hand of God, The Captain's Hand, Crossroads Part Two) were among his best, and much more interesting to me than those that seemed designed to knock him off his pedestal (Black Market, Taking a Break from All Your Worries). But of course, he spent a lot of his time in between those two extremes, which is how it should be :)

[lapsedprof.livejournal.com]

Well, thank you. It seems our postings crossed; I saw yours just when I posted mine and thought, "god, I wish I'd said that!" - wishing I'd managed to tease out the threads as thoroughly as you did.

I agree with you that the hero need not be boring or thankless, and am completely in sympathy with what you say, i.e., "there is so much honest and worthwhile disagreement about what is the right thing to do or the best way to act in any given situation that any character, "conventional" or not, will come across as ambiguous," but I think the writers and JB, too, struggled with the idea that Lee, the hero, wasn't or wouldn't remain sufficiently interesting. Whereas I became quite attached to him...

[rachelindeed.livejournal.com]

I think the writers and JB, too, struggled with the idea that Lee, the hero, wasn't or wouldn't remain sufficiently interesting. Whereas I became quite attached to him...

Me, too, that's exactly how I feel :)

Someday the people who write and play my favorite fictional characters will realize that the struggles to practice personal integrity and/or functional romantic relationships can make good drama, and that these characters and relationships will not thereby become either flawless or boring. I await that entertainment epiphany with pleasure :)

[scifishipper.livejournal.com]

So many great things have already been said about these actors, but I'll add that Katee brings a light and joie de vivre to kara that could have been easily forgotten. For me, it's a sense I get from kara that she is a genuinely beautiful person under the swagger and bravado. I think it would have been easy to play her as a uni-dimensional character, eschewing the finer points of grace, light, and spirit. She embodies all of those, even is she does it with a smirk or a punch. Katee delivers it all and more.

I agree with many of the points above about jamie, particularly that he took a "stereotypic" jock character and gave him a beautiful complexity, vulnerability and moral certitude. His early scenes with Adama, in particular, are stunning to watch. When Adama tells him "if it were you, we'd never leave" in You Can't Go Home Again, jamie's response takes my breath away.

Great topic. *squishes jamie and katee together in a smushy happy sandwich*

[delle.livejournal.com]

When Adama tells him "if it were you, we'd never leave" in You Can't Go Home Again, jamie's response takes my breath away.

I read/heard somewhere that Jamie was very uncomfortable with that scene - he felt it made Lee seem needy/insecure. Personally I loved it, because I loved the insecurities Lee hid under his strong exterior. And I loved that Jamie showed us those layers so subltely, never with a sledgehammer. His portrayal of Lee is a study in nuance.

For Katee, as someone said above, I love that she's so different from Kara in real life. She made Kara a living, breathing human being, not the "bravado" caraciture she so easily could have been. And the fact that Katee herself is so different speaks to Katee's acting chops, something I think is often overlooked when you have EJO chewing up the scenery (no, I'm not bitter about the Adama-vomits-all-over-himself from Daybreak, no, not at all)

[rachelindeed.livejournal.com]

I agree with all you say, here. I think maybe we heard the same commentary about Jamie's trepidation about that little moment in YCGHA ~ Ron Moore talks about it in his DVD commentary for the episode. If I recall correctly, he said that JB was worried that Lee would come off as sounding too needy in that scene because, as scripted, he was coming pretty close to flat-out asking his father to tell him that he loved him. So JB decided that the best reaction to play there was deeply-felt and genuine surprise at his father's affirmation; he hoped that would turn the scene from pure neediness into something a bit deeper. And I think it is one of his best moments from Season One :)

[scifishipper.livejournal.com]

Jamie is at his best when the direction is light and lets him play scenes in a nuanced way. Some of his cringeworthy scenes (the ring!) were directed by EJO, I believe.

I agree about katee's acting chops - she is spot on and amazing. (I also agree with rachelindeed, about the New Cap arc, but I blame the writers and editing. They crammed a lot of experiences into a few eps. I think her emotional interpretation was on point, but the story didn't support it well enough.)

[rachelindeed.livejournal.com]

Oh, I really love your comment here. I think you captured a lot about what I admire most in both actors. I also adore the look on Jamie's face in YCGHA, it's one of the moments where we see the most of who Lee really is as a son; I think it's more telling than any conversation he and his father ever had.

And Katee does bring a real light to Kara, doesn't she? I think too often in strong, macho-type characters humor is the first thing to go (Admiral Cain, for example, was a formidable woman but a rigid and humorless one, and even Roslin, as she became more settled in the power and pressures of the Presidency, lost the traces of self-mockery and gentle humor that graced her early career). Whereas Katee never lost that unexpected grace, she always made Kara feel so...sparkling, so full of vitality and underlying, carefully guarded sweetness. Yet she didn't sacrifice her strength or edginess or darkness in the process.

[rachelindeed.livejournal.com]

Huzzah! I warned you I might be back to talk about the accent, and I found the quotation I was looking for. This is from an interview totally unrelated to BSG, but I found it insightful. The TV show "House MD" stars a British actor named Hugh Laurie in the lead role, playing an American. One of his fellow cast members, Robert Sean Leonard, talked about the challenges inherent in putting on an accent for a television role:

Having an accent … acting is letting go and forgetting yourself, it’s the opposite of ego. It’s flying away and getting away from yourself and forgetting. And when you’re doing an accent, it’s virtually impossible to do that.

It’s hard [even] when you're in a play, doing the same lines, the same way for eight months. Hugh learns 72 new lines a day and has to put an American accent on them. It really is an actor’s nightmare. I’ve done [with accents] Brian Friel plays, Martin Sherman plays, Tom Stoppard plays, and maybe five months into it you have a night where you kind of feel OK and kind of forget the accent and let go and let the scene happen. To have a strange accent in your mouth while playing a role, and then be judged for it, that’s hard stuff.

I think that view of the technical challenge of accented acting is interesting, and I think it's neat that Jamie Bamber is so good at it and that he actually enjoys it. Clearly he has an ear for languages (he has a master's degree in romance languages and is pretty fluent in French and Italian), and one of his parents was American so he's heard the accent a lot. But still, I think it's great that he never seems bogged down in it, or like it's limiting him from fully expressing himself in the scenes he plays. And yes, there were the occasional flubs ("been" was his Achilles heel there for a while), but basically from Season Two onward I can't remember any mispronunciations. He even fixed "been" ~ it's perfect in his big courtroom speech in Crossroads 2.

So, in short, that's an impressive skill. Nice work, Mr. Bamber.

As a side note, it's still weird to me to remember that Bamber isn't his real name. The British have such a strange Equity system over there ~ so many actors wind up changing their names. I think the rule is that if someone with the same first and last name as you already holds an Equity card in a British artist's union, no duplicate names are allowed, so you have to pick a new stage name that no one else is using. Hence Jamie Griffiths became Jamie Bamber - I'm pretty sure Bamber was his mother's maiden name. Anyway, sorry for the digression. Acting - it's like a foreign country :)

[jeeshee.livejournal.com]

I caught an episode of Trauma with Jamie's sister Anastasia Griffiths - it took me a couple of moments to remember they were related and as soon as I did I could see the resemblance soooo much!

[callmeonetrack.livejournal.com]

I can't get over her resemblance to.... Helen Hunt.

(Although I see she looks like Jamie too. ;)

[scifishipper.livejournal.com]

I have to add that jamie bamber speaking french is my absolute downfall. I manage to hold it together with the english accent, but him speaking french, well, I'll be in my rack.

:D:D:D

[lapsedprof.livejournal.com]

Agreed. It's a definite weakness of mine.