Favorite Characters: Rich Hardbeck (Skins (U.K.))

As with most of my favorite characters on Skins, I like Rich because he’s such a mess.  Though, over the course of Gen 3, he gets his act together better than plenty of characters on that show, it’s his flaws that are most appealing.  As he teeters on the brink, you root for him to get it right.

At the outset, Rich is a terrific example of a textbook metalhead.  He’s got the leather, the chains, and the oppressive soundtrack to fit the tropes, and he even has cushy suburban parents to chafe against.  Every day, he meets the world with squared shoulders, prepared for the insults that will be tossed his way for being on the fringes.  He doesn’t mind it – he marches to a Rage Against the Machine beat, and he’s proud to be different.  The rub, of course, is that he’s only different within a very specific box.  He looks exactly like a metalhead; a single glance at him, and you know precisely what he’s about.  He talks about “never compromising,” about not being one of the mindless, homogenous masses, but everything about him is so carefully crafted to be a good metalhead.  He wears a shower cap to make sure his long hair looks sufficiently unwashed, and he takes his crisply-folded T-shirts out of his dresser only to crumple them into wrinkly balls. 

Additionally, he sneers just as much at the mainstream kids as they do at him.  It’s understandable – even ignoring the fact that preferred music is such an enormous, defining thing for a teenager, it’s natural to belittle people who make you feel small.  They can’t hurt you if you don’t care what they think.  However, this makes him quick to judge them, quick to write them off as frivolous, shallow, and conformist (and, obviously, as having horrible taste in music.)  When one of the popular crowd, sweet, friendly Grace, offers to help him out with a problem, he tells her she represents everything he despises and is too busy giving her attitude to realize what a great girl is.  He mocks her ignorance of metal even as he boasts his own ignorance of her music of choice:  ballet/classical, another genre outside the mainstream.

I love this storyline, because it gives Rich such an atypical plot for a character of his type.  Normally, teenagers on the fringes are plainly drawn as the victims, the plucky rebels tilting at the windmills of the vicious in-crowd.  The popular kids either remain antagonists, or they learn how cool and unique and special-snowflaky the outsiders are, opening their eyes to the greater possibilities outside their narrow boxes.  However, the fact that Rich is an insensitive little punk with a chip on his shoulder means that he gets to grow and mature.  He gets to change.  Now, he doesn’t start buying his clothes at trendy stores or listening to pop music or anything, because in the end, his story isn’t about the surface stuff on which it opens.  It’s about realizing that people are more complicated than their labels, and when he intentionally closes himself off, he can miss out on something wonderful.

As Rich lowers his walls, just a bit, we see how much more there is to him than the paint-by-the-numbers archetype.  He’s insecure, he’s clever, he’s surprisingly thoughtful when he wants to be, he’s a loyal friend, and when his limits are tested in season 6, he proves that he can push back.  When the dust settles at the end of this generation, I think he comes out the most mature of them all.  He’s the one who’s learned his lessons best, who’s been sharpened by adversity and, despite inevitable backslides into snap judgments and us vs. them posturing, who’s kept inching his way forward in terms of growth.  And after seeing where he started, you can’t help but feel proud of him.