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Big Love Is Back!

Everyone’s favorite Mormons are coming back to HBO on Jan. 18! It feels like a long time ago now we first met the families on Big Love, HBO’s drama starring Bill Paxton as Bill Henrickson, the owner of a chain of home improvement stores who practices polygamy in a suburban community in Utah. The tensions between his more modern Mormon lifestyle, which he’s trying to keep a secret from the neighbors, and the traditionalists back on the compound, including creepy prophet and Bill’s father-in-law Roman Grant (played pitch perfectly by Harry Dean Stanton), definitely drove the show, resulting in all sorts of crazy and complicated twists and turns.

Sure, so Big Love was a little campy, had a bit of the sheen of a soap opera, but all those betrayals and deceptions and slights and petty threats and even murders — !!! — were totally intriguing because the quality of the writing and especially the actors bolstered the wacky plots. The show introduced a lot of solid indie and lesser known actors to the broader public, thanks to the power and reach of HBO. For me, some of the standouts have been:

* Chloë Sevigny, an actor known as much for her quirky fashions as quirky choices, made her debut in 1995 in the low-budget indie film Kids and continued her career mainly in art house pictures. She’s totally mesmerizing in Big Love as the sneaky, pathological liar second wife Nicki, a part that shows enormous range, complete with conflicted loyalties, childish impulses, and emotional grit. She’s terribly off-putting and infuriating, yet her intensity drives much of the show. She literally throws herself into her scenes, which are subsequently some of the most passionate and impressive to watch. I believe Sevigny’s ability to enrage the audience while simultaneously engaging and hooking them reveals a special talent. I ask all you actors out there: as much fun as it might be to play a villain, is it very hard to make the audience love to hate you, rather than just hate you?

* Amanda Seyfried, a totally adorable and totally real former child model who plays Sarah Henrickson. She got her start in Mean Girls in 2004 and recently starred in the mega-hit Mamma Mia! with Meryl Streep. Owning her place in the intricate structure in Big Love — as the strong yet insecure oldest daughter who remembers her parents when there were just two of them, when things were “normal,” at least to her, and is now surrounded by two other mothers, many babies, and a family dynamic fast approaching chaotic — must take a lot of maturity and quiet strength on the part of the actor, something perhaps best described as subtlety. And boy does she nail it. Have any of you had experience as a child actor or entertainer? How did it affect or impress upon your later work as an adult?

* Shawn Doyle, who plays Bill’s brother Joey, is an acclaimed Canadian actor who only moved to Los Angeles in 2005, where he quickly amassed a long list of television credits. Doyle’s Joey is at once tender and tragic, a former football star who put all his self-esteem into the glory of the game and stumbled mightily when his career was over. He approaches life with a mixture of trepidation and tenacity, all the while trying to corral his slightly deranged and fawning only wife into not poisoning people with antifreeze. He may be more clever than he appears, or not. He may be smarter than he appears, or not. He’s certainly enduring and endearing, and absolutely more mysterious than meets the eye. That ambiguity is a credit to Doyle’s deft touch with the character. How do you play the “still waters run deep part” convincingly?

All of these great actors and many more will be bringing us more love in just a couple weeks. I for one am going to have to go to HBO’s site and catch myself up on all that was happening when we last saw the Henricksons and all their friends and enemies. You need a certain authenticity and authority from all your actors to make a show like Big Love succeed, I think, because the subject matter and narratives are not only unfamiliar but almost unknowable. The characters may be driven by the same basic human needs — acceptance, autonomy, love — and hounded by the same human flaws — fear, irresponsibility, intolerance.

But it’s hard to understand the motives and expectations behind the people of Big Love. The actors have to reign as in and keep us with them, even when we are at a loss to comprehend their situations. I am certainly looking forward to seeing what outrageous story lines this great ensemble cast will pull off next. There are so many great actors on Big Love; who are your favorites?

–Anna Bengel

Article Source: http://backstage.blogs.com/blogstage/2009/01/big-love-is-back.html

Tags: Big Love, HBO

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