Charlie sheen
Britt actor Anthony dons evil Manson guise in ‘Aquarius’
There aren’t many shows that can count Charles Manson as a series regular.
But “Aquarius,” a “psychedelic noir” procedural that debuted on NBCC last month, has been using the “helter Skelter” maniac to great effect in its exploration of thee dark side of the hippie dream in LA, circa 1967.
Finding the right actor, though, to play the vicious felon proved a challenge to creator and executive producer John McNamara. “Many actors auditioned. None had the depths of charisma, madness, raw emotion and calculating charm. We were beginning to worry a bit,” says McNamara.
Then British actor Gethin Anthony, known to American audiences from his portrayal of renly Baratheon on HBO’s “Game of Thrones,” read some scenes via Skype.
“We literally felt the hair rise on our necks,” McNamara says. “It wasn’t a reading. It was a complete performance.”
Anthony, 31, was so stoked to get the role that he lay down in the road in London and called his mother: “Mum, I’m going to play Charles Manson.”
The Manson on “Aquarius” is a charming, bisexual seducer who is both dreamy and dangerously unpredictable. he lures a harem of young, blond women to his LA canyon commune and has them commit petty crimes to get food and other necessities. In one of the show’s sur- prises, he conducts an affair with the father (Brian F. O’Byrne) of one of his “girls.”
Anthony, who played a gay character on “Thrones,” has no qualms about doing love scenes with other men.
“It’s never been too much of an issue for me. Because I happen to be heterosexual, there’s a different element at play,” he says. “It’s more of a transformation.” Sexuality, he says, was “irrelevant” to Manson. “In my mind he was using sexual congress as a weapon,” he says. In the “Aquarius” timeline, Manson is still several years away from the atrocities visited upon Sharon Tate and her friends. But he’s still chilling in these early scenes because we know how even the slightest glimpse of madness will ultimately manifest itself.
“There’s much more at play than his charisma or his rhetoric, which is there,” says Gethin by phone from London. “Charlie read books in prison on how to influence people. he was actively schooling himself on human attraction. he was interested in getting people to do his bidding.”
Gethin was a choir boy at school and that is him playing the guitar and singing Manson’s actual songs on the series. Manson, he says, put out an album.
“You can find it on YouTube,” he says. “It has about 18 songs and one of them could have been a single, but most of them are unstructured. I don’t feel a need to recommend them. They were useful to me.”
“Aquarius” was renewed for a second season a few weeks ago and Anthony, who has a non-actress girlfriend, expects to report back to work in October, when series star David Duchovny finishes shooting “The
X-Files.”
“I was a bit in awe of him,” Anthony says of Duchovny. “he’s really laid back and professional but he has this really serene presence. I had a blast.”