In The Artist, a murder happens at the estate of a charismatic tycoon during the Gilded Age, and everyone is a suspect. Real and fictional characters interact as their true natures come into focus over the course of this wild and entertaining series.
Awards Buzz had the chance to speak with stars Mandy Patinkin, Ana Mulvoy-Ten, Ever Anderson, and Clark Gregg ahead of the premiere of the first half of the series.
Patinkin acknowledged that the relationship Norman Henry is part of is far from conventional or ideal:
“It’s the most dysfunctional relationship I have ever been a part of portraying, and I’m glad that my real life is a little different. The appeal was Aram Rappaport’s gift as a human being. Not just his talent, but his nature. I thought he was a trustful, gifted man, but I felt safe with him. I thought he was a good collaborator. He reminded me of my piano players, Paul Ford and Adam Ben-David, people who I could literally make music with. That means the world to me. There were some things in the initial two scripts that I received that I wasn’t quite comfortable with. I brought it up to him. He was completely open and said, let’s change it. I was very much in desire of mining, but not mining so much as making the roots of the story of these two people, Norman and Mrs. Henry, I wanted it to be a love story even if it was a profoundly dysfunctional love story.”
Mulvoy-Ten shared the draw for her to be part of this show:
“I had wanted to do a period piece for a while. Getting to do a Gilded Age show was an absolute dream, but also just the fact that it’s called The Artist. I love art. The art and the ballet of it, I’ve grown up going to the ballet and to every art gallery and museum ever. I have a picture with the Degas ballerina eight years ago at the Met. That was really exciting, a show about art set during this period that’s so fun with such amazing people. The whole thing was just a dream.”
Anderson commented on what she was able to learn about the very real woman she was playing:
“I read a lot about the character of Evelyn Nesbit before going into it, just because I had never seen a video of her, there was not too much. There was a lot of info to go off but also at the same time, not a lot, because you’re used to now, if you’re portraying somebody real, you at least have some video evidence that they were alive and what they sounded like. I didn’t really have anything to go off there. There was Wikipedia and there was a book, a biography of hers that I wanted to go and use. But then also, being her age really helped. For me, I’m a huge history buff, so when I know that the turn of the century combined with my own personality, which I felt was similar to hers, was really fun to go about bringing the two together.”
Gregg could learn plenty about his character but wasn’t sure he wanted to:
“There’s a lot of stuff. Harry Thaw is a very famous guy in New York, it’s a very famous case. It’s fun to be able to read some backstory. There’s a lot of information on the guy. But then at a certain point, you have to kind of go, I don’t want to get hung up doing an impersonation of somebody that the person who’s there is something out of Madame Tusseau’s. You have to let them filter through you, especially if you’re going to lose control.”
Part 1 of The Artist premieres on Thanksgiving on The Network. Part 2 of premieres on Christmas.
