Tuesday, July 4, 2017

My Picks For This Year's Emmys: Best Actor in a TV Movie/Limited Series

Though many of the great performances in this category were from women,  there were more than their fair share of great schools of acting by men. I'm hoping that the Emmys will ignore the overblown work of Jude Law in The Young Pope, but the truth is HBO had more than a reasonable number of great performances. The question is, will their memories stretch back far enough.

Riz Ahmed, The Night of
Now recognized by most people for his work in Rogue One, its all too easy to forget just how magnificent his work as Naz, a young Muslim with the misfortune to pick up the wrong woman in his cab that fatal night. Watching him go from a wide-eyed innocent who couldn't believe what happened to a hardened criminal waiting for trial in Riker's was one of the most incredible journeys that any actor has taken all season. The fact that the series ended with no clear idea - even from Naz himself - whether he committed the crime or not was demonstrated in a mesmerizing turn. He may out of prison, but he will never be free.

Benedict Cumberbatch, Sherlock
Always one of the most fascinating versions of this character, Cumberbatch did some truly wondrous work in what may be the final installment of this series. Reeling from the true loss of Watson for the season, and learning some of the most haunting truths that any incarnation of this character went through, he deserves one more bite in this truly great incarnation of a character we all thought we knew.

Robert DeNiro, The Wizard of Lies
It wasn't as histrionic as some of the performances we tend to get in HBO movies. But watching the world of Bernie Madoff unravel like the Ponzi schemes he set into motion was a rare act of subtlety in this gifted actors work. Deniro has been reviving his career very well ever since Silver Linings Playbook, and for once, I wouldn't object to watching a great actor take a spot that could go to a less recognized on.

Timothy Hutton, American Crime
Hutton has been one of the more undervalued actors in this extraordinary anthology series, always playing characters who have been gutted by some kind of loss, and can't take the right path to revive. Here, playing the owner of a furniture factory so frustrating with the way life has taken him that he can't even enjoy his professional or personal life, he did another one of his more incredible portrayals. Inexplicably he was ignored by the Emmys last year. I hope they won't make the same mistake again.

Ewan MacGregor, Fargo
And here is the out and out favorite in this category. It's one thing that he played two very different characters as Emmett and Ray Stussy, two men whose fortunes take very different paths after an exchange of bequeathals twenty years earlier. Its another to show that both of these men, despite their different fortunes, would undergo a series of events that would cause each of them to lose everything. And I don't know if there was any other actor who could make us feel such compassion for two different men both engaged in horrible acts to destroy the other - and that in the end did. It'll be very difficult for him to lose this year.

John Turturro, The Night Of
It tells you something that the role that Turturro was going to play - a wizened attorney drawn into saving a young man, all the while suffering from psorasis - was originally meant for James Gandolfini. It tells even more about Turturro as an actor that he was able to make you completely forget that this role was meant for him, and that now they may try to build a series around it. It was a memorable portrayal in a series full of them. Turturro has been one of the great ignored character actors of our time. He deserves a nomination at least.

WILD CARD
Kyle Macalahan, Twin Peaks: The Return
Same factors apply that I listed in the Best Limited Series. But its remarkable that A, he's not repeating the version of Agent Cooper that mesmerized us so much in the past, and B, he's playing two different versions of himself, completely different from the character we know so well. In a series that bares so little resemblance even to the Lynchian project we knew so well, he remains the stalwart figure, even if he is pretending to be someone else both times. And really, that's worth an Emmy nod in itself.




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