This story about Apple TV+’s Black Bird and Paul Walter Hauser first appeared in the limited series/movie edition of TheWrap awards magazine.
It’s been almost a year since Dennis Lehane’s “Black Bird” premiered on Apple TV+, and viewers are still raving about its Critics Choice and Golden Globe Award-winning portrayal of its star Paul Walter Hauser as the serial killer of the Larry Hall real world.
Icy-textured and eerily disconcerting, his portrayal of the notorious Civil War reenactor-turned-assassin, one who could be responsible for as many as 50 disappearances of young women, by some authority estimates, is slower and more menacing than a mustache. . Hauser, buoyed by Lehane’s script, also conveys an inner angst that mirrors the behavior to this day, seen in the many violent, disenfranchised, often white men who make headlines, since the 6th of January to the mass shooting of the week.
No wonder Hauser has been thinking lately about the implications of toxic masculinity. But it is not the first time that he has excavated such themes through his work.
“Of many ways, [Larry is] similar to some of the roles I’ve played in a movie like ‘BlacKkKlansman’ or ‘I, Tonya,’ which is a wrong, angry, unrequited, unrequited man in America,” Hauser said. “I think a lot of this bad behavior from some of these characters that I play all stems from how they grew up and how they handle rejection and pain on their own: the death of dreams, the death of ideas and becoming in an outcast. in the world.”
Hauser said he didn’t have to look at today’s headlines to find dejected and bitter men looking for inspiration, either. While playing Larry, he found himself thinking about “the socially awkward men I’ve encountered in my life” and leaning on their “physical tics”, their “poor hygiene” and their habit of “voicing socially awkward opinions”. That was just a starting point.
“Those are all the building blocks of the character, and then the inner life is quite rich when you have Dennis Lehane’s dialogue and you know this guy was a serial offender who was changing his history and making this game of deception,” he said. . “But at the same time, I think he got caught up in his own web of deceit. He is his own victim, although many victims lay before him.