We’re rounding the corner towards catching up on Andrew Rannells’s career chronology. Now we’re up to season 1 of Black Monday. It’s a show that I was a little lukewarm on initially, mostly in it for Rannells and the other main cast members, but it didn’t take long to prove itself surprising, darkly funny, really sharp, and a master of the long game. Today, we’re looking at the character Rannells plays on the show (Blair-related spoilers.)
At first blush, Blair has more in common with The Book of Mormon’s Elder Price than any of the major characters Rannells has played in more recent years. Though lacking Elder Price’s relentless positivity and self-assurance, Blair is the relatively straitlaced fish-out-of-water among all the raucous, vulgar, openly-corrupt traders at the Jammer Group. He’s an easy mark for Mo, who’s finally found his way into the notoriously-difficult Georgina Play by coming at the coveted shares via Blair’s fiancée Tiff. As Blair flounders around trying to make his way in the real world of Wall St., which all his booksmarts failed to prepare him for, Mo manipulates him with ease, not-so-subtly shuffling Blair into the position Mo needs him to be in. When Blair causes snags in Mo and Dawn’s plans early on, it’s something he does both unknowingly and rather ineptly.
Blair gives off the vibe of a naïve hayseed, a guppy in shark-infested waters, and Mo will pull off the trade of the century if clueless do-gooder Blair doesn’t screw it up. But over the course of the first season, Blair slowly starts to get wise, picking up on the little things that don’t add up and beginning to put it together. By the end of season 1, we’re treated to an end-of-Harry-Potter-book-style villain reveal, with Blair monologuing to Mo about how he and Dawn have teamed up behind Mo’s back to yank the Georgina Play out from under him. It’s their actions, not Mo’s, that ultimately cause the Black Monday stock crash, but the Blair who unironically said in the pilot, “Don’t you remember what it was like to be uncorrupted?”, doesn’t care about the havoc he’s about to wreak on the economy.
What I really like about Blair, and Rannells’s performance, in season 2 is that we see how much he’s actually a combination between the gullible screw-up of the pilot and the Wall St. mastermind he’s tried to reshape himself into. It doesn’t take long to see that, while Blair gets all the credit, Dawn is the true brains of their dynamic duo. Blair is the publically-lauded face of their new firm, posing on magazine covers and schmoozing with politicians as Dawn keeps the lights on and tries to stay ahead of Mo’s revenge plays. Although Blair talks a big game and has leveled up with suave suits, contact lenses, and steroids, and although he proves himself to be darkly ruthless at times, a big part of him is still that clueless kid who got played almost the instant he set foot on the trading floor.
This dichotomy provides so much great material for Rannells to work with. Blair is constantly surprising me on the show – I never know when he’s gonna fumble the ball, go for the jugular, get unexpectedly vulnerable, or regress into a moment of sunshiny innocence. There are moments when it’s almost scary to watch how cold-blooded he can be, but then he’ll flail around ridiculously a few scenes later. And yet, all of it hangs together. I clearly see how these disparate sides of Blair cohere, what’s artifice and what’s genuine, where he deludes himself and where his actions surprise even him. It’s a real treat of a character for Rannells to play, and despite those notes of familiarity with Elder Price, Blair is ultimately something very different than we’ve had a chance to see from Rannells before.
No comments:
Post a Comment