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Tabita Knezevic
OMG! There seems to be as many new streaming service announcements in the news as there are scandals coming out of this administration (right out the gate you have my signature Trump snub for every movie and/or TV blog post.) Last week Tyler Perry tweeted this:
Saldana has made a name for herself playing such strong-willed women: from Uhura in the JJ Abrams spawned Star Trek series, to Neytiri in Avatar to Gamora in the MCU; and even to her controversial, yet brilliantly performed role as Nina Simone in Nina, Saldana has both the presence and the talent to make a complicated and crucial role like Mary Talbot come to life.
Orjii started her career as a stand-up comic, and like most comics-turned-actors, she is able to tap into a darker side and draw performances from inner pain. I think she does that brilliantly on the hit HBO show Insecure. Orjii would bring a level of humanity to the character of Lady Edith that would make both Edith, and her real-life alter-ego actor, Laura Carmichael, very proud.
Tom is the dashing, handsome, Irish Republican and radically political chauffeur who marries into the Crawley family when the youngest sister, Cybil, falls in love with him, runs off, marries him, and bears him a child. Naturally, she dies giving birth, leaving Tom a widower, and ripping the hearts right out of every one of us fans who had to sit there and see the beautiful, spunky, just and pure, family rebel, dear Lady Cybil die while giving birth to her child. (DAMN YOU LORD JULIAN FELLOWES FOR PUTTING ME THROUGH THAT!)
Lady Maud Bagshaw is one of the last remaining heiresses of the Crawley family, cousin to the Grantham matriarch, Violet Dowager. She and Violet are at odds with one another, the reasons for which surround the mystery as to why Lady Bagshaw, aunt to Robert Crawley, has not formerly decided to leave her wealth to Robert, the oldest living male heir.
The role needs to be held by someone we can believe has the fortitude and will to stand up to and put in her place a woman as opinionated, strong-willed, and powerful as Violet Crawley. Angela Bassett is regal, renown, and comes pre-installed with the bad-assery necessary to stand up to violet.
Barrow is a complicated man with a troubled soul. As a gay man living in 1920s Great Britain, where such a lifestyle was illegal, Barrow has to hide a part of who he is from the world. But in earlier seasons he was self-loathing, and that hatred of self poured out onto his treatment of his fellow servants. However, over time, as the audience came to understand his plight, his character and reception evolved.
Andy is a low class footman whose illiteracy is revealed in season 6. The free-spirited and ambitious Daisy rises to the occasion to help him learn to read. The two fall in love and become betrothed (kinda). In the movie, Daisy appears to have doubts about whether Andy is the man for her.
Mr. Molesley is quite a character. A man who means well but is clumsy, often unsure of himself, and could trip over his own shadow. But he also has a child-like spirit and joy that is infectious and comes to light when he hears the royal family is coming to Downton. In fact, by far the best scene in the movie is equally laugh out loud funny and absolutely terrifying. I (and many other people in the audience) audibly gasped when it happened and it involves Mr. Molesley.
A tall and lanky gentleman with such a cartoon-like presence would be played beautifully by Key, and I would love to see a comedic genius like Key bring both his pathos and comedic timing to a character like Molesley.
Yes, I have already cast Key in another role as Mr Molesley. But, another aspect of Hamilton is the casting of certain actors in two roles. Daveed Diggs famously played both Thomas Jefferson and the Marquis de Lafayette in the original Broadway run of the show. So, why not do the same for the Hamiltonized version of D.A.
As I just mentioned above, the royal staff can come off a bit cartoonish, and the most egregiously delightful cartoon of the bunch is the French and over-bearing chef. This dude is to French people what Step n Fetchit is to black people. Think about the most stereotyped, arrogant, and loud Frenchman, and you have Chef Courbet. From the over-the-top accent to the equally audacious personality, Keegan Michael-Key would be spot on.
McDonald could bring just the right balance of black bougie-ness (the equivalent of snootiness in the black community) with an air of humanity needed to give the audience just a touch of compassion (but not too much).
Princess Mary has a sadness that she carries around due to the weight of being a royal daughter and being married to someone who appears to be a (much older) royal pain in the ass. You can see the sadness in her eyes, played beautifully by Kate Phillips.
In a show filled to the brim with strong women at a time when in reality women had very little power, Violet has a wisdom that comes with living decades in British aristocracy, having her fair share of trollups in her youth, and helping to shepherd a family into a new age. And her one-liners and quips are to die for.
The official site for the satirical memoir that will either crack you up, piss you off, or both. An emotionally moving, frequently funny, and often politically poignant coming of age story. Except the age is 50.
Season 4 of Julian Fellowes' Downton Abbey picks up six months after Matthew's death and finds a family deep within the throes of mourning: Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery) is a ghostly presence in the household, a black-clad widow staring out the window with unspeakable loss weighing on her slight shoulders. And the rest of the Crawleys are concerned about her, plagued by the question of whether to shield her from further hurt or bring her back to the world once more. While Mary and her also widowed brother-in-law, Fenian chauffeur turned Crawley hanger-on Tom Branson (Allen Leech) are thrown together in grief, their storyline oddly splinters after a few episodes. While I'm glad to see that the two aren't forced into a ghastly romantic subplot together, as some fans may have hoped, there's something strange about the way their familial plot fizzles out.
To this point, Season 4 is the year where Lady Edith (Laura Carmichael) comes to the fore. Given the unexpected and therefore deeply traumatic death of Lady Sybil (Jessica Brown Findlay) in the third season, the Crawley sisters have been a fragmented lot, though they're joined in the estate's well-appointed drawing room by Lady Rose MacClare (Lily James), who appears within the show to both create mischief and lower the average age of the characters by pushing out the youth contingent once more. While Edith has featured prominently in the show's myriad of plots, the middle Crawley sister has often been given short shrift, typically reduced to being either a foil for Mary or a doormat of sorts, either driving a tractor or getting left at the altar. But in the fourth season, Edith finally blossoms, becoming a truly modern woman with both her own desires and her own secrets.
When Edith enters a gorgeous London restaurant to meet her married editor, Michael Gregson (Charles Edwards), there's a realization that she is one of the few members of the Crawley clan to look toward and embrace the future and its possibilities. And Carmichael seems to relish the opportunity to play Edith not as a nag nor a misunderstood villainess, but as the heroine of her own story, one whose romantic impulses have been thwarted in the past (poor, poor Edith) but who is approaching her first blush of love with the ardor of a woman who is determined to change her fate in a way. It's even more unfortunate then that her storyline is advanced at such a minute level that it quickly becomes infuriating, particularly when the season ends without much clarity on that front. (And, yes, I'm being intentionally vague here for reasons that will become clear once you view the season as a whole.)
More successful is the handling of Lady Mary's tentative efforts to rejoin the world of single women, particularly as she is faced with a bevy of handsome, eligible suitors: aristo Anthony Foyle, Lord Gillingham (Tom Cullen); haughty Charles Blake (Julian Ovenden); and mainstay Evelyn Napier (Brendan Patricks), the latter of whom has had his heart broken many times over by Mary. There's a somber reticence to Mary that is in keeping with her grief over Matthew's death, but also a dawning realization that she (and the show, let's be honest) must move on from despair into acceptance. Downton is a soap opera after all (a grand one, at that), and there needs to be romantic conflict sparking somewhere in the halls of the great estate. But the attention lavished on Mary comes with a steep price for someone else at Downton, however inadvertent, and the consequences of this other subplot throw Downton Abbey into a bit of additional darkness (and some controversy).
Which is to say that there is still drama aplenty within the show, but some odd creative choices abound. The final episode of Season 4 (which aired last month in the U.K. as the show's latest Christmas special) bizarrely feels like it was co-plotted by Alfred Hitchcock at times, delivering a plot that (SPOILER ALERT!) devolves into forgery, theft, and blackmail and features appearances by the Prince of Wales (Oliver Dimsdale) and his mistress, Freda Dudley Ward (Janet Montgomery), as well as Paul Giamatti as Harold Levinson, the Teapot Dome-scandalized brother of Cora (Elizabeth McGovern), who is suddenly thrust into a romance plot with a character we've never met before.
Forced to innovate due to the departure of master conniver Miss O'Brien (Siobhan Finneran), Fellowes introduces a new meandering subplot involving Thomas (Rob James-Collier) and the mysterious Svengali-like sway he holds over new lady's maid Miss Baxter (Raquel Cassidy). (Thomas as a whole is a problematic character this year, reduced to glowering and plotting without much relief.)
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