Nelson digs deep in new TV role
“That’s a scoop!” Tim Blake Nelson exclaimed over the phone earlier this month, having just revealed the single line he asked Damon Lindelof, creator of HBO’s “Watchmen,” to change in the fifth episode. The veteran character actor plays a masked vigilante by the name of Looking Glass, who was initially said to be from Tulsa. But Nelson, who’s from Tulsa himself, had been speaking in a southern Oklahoma accent and asked if Looking Glass could instead say he’s from a town by the Texas border.
“I don’t think the Earth is going to shake on its axis or anything,” Nelson said of the revelation, laughing. “It’s no ‘quid pro quo’ or smoking gun.”
Maybe not. But it does indicate how meticulous Nelson, Lindelof and the rest of the cast and crew have been in crafting “Watchmen,” which takes place 35 years after the events of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ groundbreaking graphic novel. Like Regina King’s Angela Abar (aka Sister Night), Looking Glass works with the Tulsa police to fight a white supremacist group called the Seventh Kavalry. He’s been a steady presence throughout the season thus far, but remained rather opaque. It wasn’t until Sunday night that we got a real look at the man behind the reflective mask: Wade Tillman.
On the brink of nuclear
“A guy contending with having experienced unspeakable trauma at an extremely fragile moment.”
Director Woody Allen is 84. Actress-singer Bette Midler is 74. Singer Gilbert O’Sullivan is 73. Comedian Sarah Silverman is 49. Actor Riz Ahmed is 37. Actress Ilfenesh Hadera is 34. Singer-actress Janelle Monae is 34. Actress Zoe Kravitz is 31.
Dec. 1 birthdays:
war, American society in “Watchmen” was irrevocably affected by a catastrophe referred to as “11/2,” after the 1985 date on which it took place. A giant, squidlike creature fell into the heart of New York, killing half of the city’s population and sending a psychic shock wave through the region. We learn via flashback that Wade, then a timid, religious teenager, happened to be at a carnival in Hoboken, New Jersey, that night. We watch him stagger out of a house of mirrors, where a girl had pranked him by undressing him and running away with his clothes, to find himself surrounded by carnage.
Though Nelson was unaware of this specific backstory when he began to play Wade — Lindelof “allows for the experiencing of a character to be like the way we experience life,” per the actor, who didn’t receive the fifth episode’s script until well into shooting the third — his portrayal of a middleaged Wade has consistently reflected, as he phrased it, “a guy contending with having experienced unspeakable trauma at an extremely fragile moment in his life, at an extremely fragile age in his life.”
“He’ll forever associate meaningful relationships — and the trust that goes along with meaningful relationships, not to mention his sexual impulses — with catastrophe,” Nelson said. “And he spent his life, now, getting over that. So to me, he gets into law enforcement as a way not only to promote justice, but also as a way to hide inside of a structure, a code and, eventually, a mask.”