‘TYPICAL’ GUY
Schwimmer plays dopey, arrogant agent
The judge then replied that he has “come across it.”
Depp is in the midst of a suit stemming from an article published in 2018 by British tabloid The Sun that called the actor a “wife-beater.” The newspaper’s parent company, News Group Newspapers, and Dan Wootton, executive editor of The Sun, are named in the suit.
Depp has denied allegations that he abused Heard during their marriage, which lasted from 2015 to 2017.
The actor also claimed that he found himself “$100 million in the hole” after the former business managers failed to pay his taxes over the course of 17 years. He and the managers settled their legal tussle in 2018.
Heard is not a target in the lawsuit. The Sun has based its defense on 14 accusations of alleged violence by Depp.
Last week, Depp described an acrimonious relationship with Heard and spoke about an alleged defecation incident that he said signified “an oddly fitting end” to their marriage.
Heard has blamed that incident on one of their two Yorkshire terriers pooping in their bed on the night that followed her 30th birthday.
ADavid Schwimmer’s characters keep getting worse.
First there was Ross on “Friends,” annoying, oblivious and possessive. In “American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson,” Schwimmer played lawyer Robert Kardashian representing an accused killer.
Now he’s crossing the ocean for “Intelligence,” a new workplace comedy about the U.K.’s Government Communications Headquarters on NBC Universal’s new streaming site Peacock.
“I like that he’s unlikable. He’s the kind of guy that we see a lot of right now,” Schwimmer told the Daily News about his character, NSA agent Jerry Bernstein, who he joked resembles “a typical American in power right now.”
“He’s an alpha male, he’s arrogant, he’s pompous, he’s unknowingly racist, sexist, homophobic, ultrapatriotic, mostly because he’s never been outside of the country and speaks no other language.
“What he lacks in intelligence, he makes up for in confidence.”
Creator Nick Mohammed, who also co-stars alongside Schwimmer as the bumbling Joseph Harries, defended his show’s crude comedy, saying the writers room once threw out a joke about transgender people because no one on staff was transgender.
“But in talking about race, I felt that I had good license to talk about race and blur those boundaries a little bit,” said the “Christopher Robin” actor, whose mother was born in Cyprus. His dad is from Trinidad.
“I think the key thing was that if it was a good joke, it would make the cut. Nothing was gratuitous, to a degree, but anyone could find anything offensive. We wanted to deliberately tackle quite sensitive subject matter, not least because this is set in a workforce that deals with really tragic and difficult things.”
“Intelligence” opens as Jerry arrives at GCHQ, bent on taking over the well-established agency that doesn’t seem to need him at all. He thinks it’s a promotion; his new boss (Sylvestra Le Touzel) quickly realizes the NSA just wanted Jerry out of the building. Mohammed described him as “brash and egotistical (with) delusions of grandeur,” a generous description for a man who brazenly assumes a woman couldn’t possibly be in charge of the team and who repeatedly asks his co-workers to take off their clothes as part of a bonding activity.
The surrounding characters of “Intelligence” are all one-note stereotypes: the mysterious hacker who brags about her sex life in the middle of the office (Gana Bayarsaikhan), the messy nerd who flusters with a glance (Jane Stanness) and the boss tasked with wrangling the team (Le Touzel).
Schwimmer insists that the jokes, like one about Joseph going “from man to woman” after dyeing his hair blond, are the results of trusting “our own guts and our own judgments.”
“We want to push it. We want to take risks,” he told The News. “I think it’s important that comedy does take risks and we can laugh at some of all of these issues that we’re talking about.”
“Intelligence” premieres on Peacock, NBC Universal’s new streaming site, on Wednesday.