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 :)
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2010-07-10 05:05 pm (UTC)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 :)