For the first time in at least
five years there's no clear frontrunner in this category. And I'm excluding Charlie Hunnam for Ed
Gein in large part because the reception for the third season of Monster
was mixed at best and while Hunnam
was nominated for many Best Actor awards at the end of last year in the last
few months the buzz has died down. Neither the Astras nor the Dorians nominated
him. So while he make sneak in I'm not prepared to go that far. And while this
does involve TV Movies, like in every other category below I'm not going to
include it. It's not that like the Emmys will either (but you never know)
Here are the five men I've chosen.
Jamie Bell, Half Man
It was a certainty that Jamie Bell
was going to be nominated for Half Man, the only question was in which
category. Once that was sorted out Bell almost immediately shot to the top of
the charts. With good reason: his word as the adult Niall Kennedy is one of the
most riveting performances so far this year.
We first meet Niall on his wedding
day, terrified that Reuben is going to show up for reasons we have no idea why
at the start and don't become clear until the series reaches its second half.
We're led to believe that Niall has finally found happiness and has
acknowledges his truth self. It's not until we meet him as an adult that we
realize just how much denial and misery he's gone through. Niall believed he
was a man with potential to break out of his working class background and in
fact he had no abilities as a writer. He was so ashamed of his homosexuality he
spent his life sleeping with male prostitutes in the shadows to the point he
was even blackmailed. Then he ended up getting married in a relationship
everyone seemed to know was a beard but he seemed more angry at just how good
Rueben's life was after prison. And so in the penultimate episode we watched as
Niall destroyed everything good in Reuben's life – much of it after he
learned how badly he'd failed. Then he managed his one success as a novelist –
only to find that yet again he was a secondary character. Then we saw him
engage in hidden sex parties at a bathhouse which led to a disaster involving
both the death of Reuben's mother and misery at her funeral. And then he
revealed that his greatest secret was just how much he had done to bring
unhappiness to his life – and one last time his self-destructive nature
emerged.
All of this is done with majesty
by Bell, who gives his entire performance as someone who has so much
self-loathing he spends his entire life afraid to face who he is and seems more
determined to be the architect of his own misery then try to be true to
himself. His fate is tragic at the end of series but in a way it's also inevitable.
For an actor who has been a force of nature since he debut in Billy Elliot this
is arguably one of the best performances he's ever given.
Paul Anthony Kelly, Love Story
How do you step into the role of a
man who was considered the heir to Camelot? You engage in one of the most
in-depth casting calls before reaching for a relative unknown. This was one of
the biggest risks of Love Story but in the case of Paul Anthony Kelly as
JFK, Jr it absolutely paid off.
Kelly shows us the man behind the
magazine covers to show a man who bore the weight of his father's name his
entire life and seemed to bear the paparazzi that came with it. We see a man
who is terribly insecure, who seems to bear the burdens of his mother and his
sister and finally finds his soulmate in a woman who spends the first third of
the series ignoring his advances. When on their first date Carolyn asks him:
"When did you first know you were a son of a President?" you can tell
he's never been asked the question before and that earnestness follows him.
In Kelly's portrayal we see a man
who is struggling through life, trying to figure out what he wants to do with
it – a burden most of us deal with but has extra weight for a man named after
JFK. Much of the series shows Kelly failing and blundering every step of the
way professionally and with his family. The only place he seems to succeed is
with Carolyn and as we see in the final third, he seems to be blundering that.
And he can never forget who he is: in a stunning scene we see Caroline reacted
after Princess Di's murder and Kelly makes it clear he can't deal with it – it
brings back a trauma his family seems unable to escape, one that will
eventually come for him. The series never lets us forget how this love story
ends; it's a tribute to Kelly that we spend the series hoping against hope
things will work out different.
This series lived and died on its
two leads and Kelly was up to the task.
Oscar Isaac, Beef
How has Oscar Isaac gotten this
far in his career and somehow never gotten any major awards? I'm still royally
pissed that his most notable prestige TV projects Scenes from a Marriage only
got one Emmy nomination – for Isaac – and as a result he had no chance of
winning in a stacked field. Isaac has been one of the greatest actresses in the
21st century and now reunited with his co-star from Inside Llewyn
Davis (we'll deal with her below) he is at the center of the highly
anticipated second season of Beef.
Isaac is such a big, awkward
looking man that his appearance frequently disguises just how broken most of
the characters he plays are. He uses this to his advantage as Josh, the head of
a country club that is about to be taken over and that he and his wife are
holding on to for jobs in a desperate need for status. Their marriage has been
struggling for a while and when they are caught on an iPhone Josh tries to use
his position to talk Ally, the employee who filmed it down in a way that can
only come across as frightening even though its just his desperation showing.
And it backfires spectacularly, leaving him forced to give an incredibly
unqualified woman a job she has no ability to handle. This leads him to believe
he can manipulate her into a situation to give him and his wife financial
security for life as well as a fresh start. Because this is Beef is
backfires spectacularly and Josh ends up doing things and going place we
absolutely know he's not prepared for.
Isaac is long overdue recognition
from any awards show – Oscars, Golden Globes, Emmys – for more than fifteen
years of incredible performances as one of our most undervalued actors. He's
going to get nominated this year. That's a start.
Matthew Rhys, The Beast In Me
It was a given that Matthew Rhys
was going to be attending the Emmys this year as a nominee along with his wife
Keri Russell. The question is now how many nominations he'll be getting.
His odds for being nominated for Best Actor in a Comedy for Widow's Bay are
going through the roof but if that doesn't work he's definitely going to
be there for his incredible work as Nile Jarvis.
I'd long since thought I was
incapable of being surprised by Rhys as an actor but yet again he did so as a
man who is suspected of murdering his wife even though no one could touch him,
who oozes threat and danger in everything he does (and he's more than capable
of it in the present), a man who makes you uncomfortable when he's eating
chicken. And Rhys portrays Jarvis by someone who likes being a dick, who
thinks he's the smartest person in the room, who likes making Aggie
uncomfortable every time they're together, who likes outsmarting her. Even when
we think we know what he's capable of, he finds a way to rise below it and even
when we know the truth about him, we're not just convinced it's another lie.
Rhys has already been nominated
for nearly every award in the book for his work in The Beast in Me so a
nomination is nearly inevitable. The question is how many nominations he'll get
and how many awards he wins? Because I'm pretty sure he will. You don't want to
piss him off by having him lose.
Michael Shannon, Death by
Lightning
Of all the actors I've listed
Shannon is both the least likely to be nominated and the only one so far who
has an award to show for it. He received the prize for Outstanding Actor in a
Limited Series from the Gotham TV awards. In fact both he and the series have
gotten their share of nominations with Shannon being nominated for Best Limited
Series by the Critics Choice Awards and the series being nominated by the TCA
earlier this month.
And Shannon is more than overdue
recognition from the Emmys; he's been owed something since his incredible work
as Nelson Van Algren, the ultra-religious Prohibition agent who finds himself
working for Al Capone. He's been one of our greatest actors in film and TV for
over two decades, capable of disappearing into roles. So the fact that he
managed to do so into James Garfield, a man who history has all but forgotten,
a President only known for his assassination, should not be a shock. Shannon
plays Garfield as a man who didn't come to the Republican convention with the
plan to be President and left as its nominee. We see the way his life would
intersect with Charles Guitean and how it ended tragedy that may have brought
about reform that Garfield himself might never have done.
Like so many performances
Shannon's is less showy then the ones in this category but its just as worthy
of a nomination. I hope he's there.
FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION
Mitchell
Robertson, Half Man
Considering how the first half of Half
Man revolves around Reuben and Niall as teenagers the actors who played
them were just as important. Gadd went to great lengths to cast two relative
unknowns who looked very much like Bell and Gadd as adults. Both performers
were quickly hailed for their work. The question was where would they compete.
With Robertson deciding to
shortlist himself as Lead Actor his odds drop dramatically compared to his
counterpart (I'll get to him below) but it's certainly not because of the
caliber of his work. Indeed Robertson's performance is just as central to Half
Man working as any of the adult counterparts because we need to get a
picture of just how badly bullied and broken Niall is before Reuben ends up in
his home, how terrified he is of him at first and how he gets lured into his
orbit. So much so that he can't survive one day in college before he calls
Reuben for help – and that leads to the tragedy that shapes both men's lives
for the decades to come. Just as horrible is seeing how Niall is clearly being
manipulated to lie in his testimony for a greater good – and how everyone
around him uses him to do so – and how he first agrees, then breaks under the
stress of it, again shaping their lives.
It's a powerful and wrenching
performance that rivals the work of last year's phenomena Owen Cooper in Adolescence.
Whether it will pay off for him the same way it did for Cooper is highly
unlikely but it's just as great.
Tomorrow I deal with Outstanding
Lead Actress in a Limited Series. I'm going to go off-script here as you'll
see.
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