Favorite Characters: Mickey Maguire (Shameless (U.K.))

 

I’ll admit that I wasn’t a fan of Mickey at first.  When he first appeared in the fourth season of the long-running British dramedy, I thought he was too over-the-top and cartoonish.  He quickly won me over, though, and by the time he parted ways with the series, he was far and away my favorite character.

 

Chatsworth, the rough council estate where the Manchester series makes its home, is populated with colorful characters who come and go over the years.  Mickey is one of many Maguires, the local crime family that lives next door to the protagonist Gallagher clan.  The Maguires have their fingers in a number of illicit pots:  drugs, extortion, money laundering, and so forth.  In short, they make the cheekily law-breaking, benefit-fraud-committing Gallaghers look like model citizens.

 

Like most of the ever-expanding Maguire family, Mickey manifests seemingly out of thin air as soon as the plot requires their family tree to sprout another ne’er-do-well branch.  His earliest ties, however, are to one of the Gallaghers; he’s brought in as a one-off love interest (or rather, one-night-stand) for Ian.  While, at this point in the series, Ian has been gradually becoming more comfortable with his sexuality and is known by many Chatsworth residents to be gay, Mickey is so deep in the closet he smells like mothballs.  He’s a wannabe tough guy riddled with internalized homophobia, but he falls fast and hard for Ian and is hurt when the slighter, less masculine boy breaks it off with him.

 

With Mickey, there’s this fantastic patchwork of at-odds traits that makes for a terrifically entertaining character.  He looks up to his gangster parents and older brothers and desperately wants to make them proud of him, whether that’s through dealing drugs, roughing someone up, or another staple of organized crime.  The problem is that, though he has plenty of enthusiasm for all these activities, he’s almost hopelessly inept and screws up most things he touches.  He’s not clever enough or hard enough to gain any real street cred, and he chafes at being the butt of family jokes.

 

Given his background, he spends a long time trying to deny his sexuality.  The rest of his close-knit family already think he’s a wimp, and he can’t bear the thought of them finding out he’s gay.  Really, it’s hard for him to bear admitting it to himself.  So he walks around with an exaggerated machismo, tosses out homophobic slurs, and makes a show of imaginary female conquests while wholeheartedly pining for Ian (somewhat to Ian’s horror.)  At the same time, he’s a bundle of repressed desires who’s at least beginning to dip his toes into the Manchester gay scene, and as he starts to begrudgingly come to terms with his identity, he explores the many different things that he is.

 

What can I say?  He’s a loose cannon, a hopeless romantic, and a terrible liar who insists on lying.  He’s a bit stupid, kind of a jerk, and 100% gung ho.  He can be extremely sensitive, surprisingly sweet, and shockingly obtuse.  His sole wishes in life are to be an upstanding criminal and to find someone who loves him, and his pursuit of them is both endearing and amusing.  Oh, and he’s hilarious – you wouldn’t believe the crazy stuff he gets up to.  With all these interesting angles, flaws, and qualities, how I could not love having him on my screen?