PICK OF THE WEEK SOLOS
Amazon Prime Video, May 21
One of the biggest treats you can give an actor is a whole stage to themselves. For theatre actors the opportunities for oneperson shows, soliloquies and monologues are dime a dozen, but unless they’re James Franco in 127 Hours, silver screen actors are rarely given a whole movie or TV episode to themselves.
That’s the point of difference boasted by Amazon Prime Video’s new anthology series Solos. A show for the socially distanced age, each short episode stars a different actor and no one else, putting each of them into a vaguely science fiction-y scenario.
Imagine if you could meet yourself, posits the first episode with Anthony Mackie (Falcon in the Marvel Cinematic Universe) as a successful big-money trader. After seeing a heartwarming segment on The Today Show, he’s shelled out $30,000 for what they’re calling a “reunion”, and now he’s face-to-face with himself — and he’s freaking out about how weird his nose and neck really look.
The episode drops us right in at the moment of meeting, and lets us put together the rest of the puzzle and discover the deeper reasons he wanted to meet himself over the next 22 minutes. It’s a brief vignette that’s at various points funny and poignant, and most importantly allows Mackie to act his heart out in dialogue with . . . himself.
Inevitably, each episode is more about the actor than anything else. Helen Mirren’s episode is one of the highlights, putting her in a serenely peaceful looking spaceship, chatting away to the onboard AI about a life spent in apology for her existence, not wanting to take up space or be any bother. The whole episode is just Dame Helen sitting in one place, the cameras switching between a handful of different camera angles — but in her hands, the story is captivating.