They’ve also all been extraordinarily portrayed by Jared Harris.
Harris, the 58-year-old son of late actor Richard Harris, has become Peak TV’s go-to guy for characters who are weighted down by a fate they can’t shake. Sometimes it’s a fate of their own making (Pryce, Breakspear); more often than not it isn’t (King George VI, Crozier, Legasov). But whatever the case, it’s always a fate that comes with severe reckoning. In fact, Harris’s characters all come up against the severest reckoning of all -- death.
One might think that getting killed off in every show would be an impediment to an actor’s career. After all, dead people generally don’t reappear in subsequent seasons. Then again, the quicker you’re stricken from one series the faster you can jump into the next. And ever since Mad Men’s Pryce was found hanging from the back of his office door, Harris’s career has been popping along with remarkable speed. In fact, he’d committed to playing genius probability-pusher Hari Seldon in Apple TV+’s take on Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series before Breakspear’s blood could even be mopped up off of Carnival Row.
That momentum shows no signs of abating either, despite some very high profile warning signs earlier in his career.
“I remember one time going in to meet Danny Devito for a movie that he was directing,” recalls Harris. “He said I saw your reel and I was really fascinated to meet you, kid, because I had no idea what you would look like or how tall you were going to be. You’re so different in everything on the reel. I didn’t even know what you were going to sound like!’
“‘It’s a ballsy approach to take,’ he says. Then he added, ‘Good luck, kid, you’re going to need it.’”
“I laughed because I didn’t know what he meant,” Harris continues. “But he said ‘listen in Hollywood a successful actor is a recognizable actor. You’re trying to start from scratch each time. You’re hoping that eventually it will catch up to you. Good luck.’”
Harris didn’t get the role. But he didn’t let DeVito’s warning get him down either. “DeVito wasn’t wrong,” Harris recalls. “But I figured WTF, I'll take the chance it will catch up with me.” Good that he took that chance too. Because the move proved steady can also win the race. It also enabled Harris to carve out a career trajectory that’s uniquely his own.
Harris has been building momentum for himself pretty much from the get. Then again, he didn’t have much choice other than to choose to go his own way.
“I’d been coming out to L.A. and trying to get noticed,” he recalls. “In one week I auditioned for a serial killer, a computer-generated serial killer and the ghost of a serial killer. I’d had enough. So I decided to go back to New York. I knew that if my overhead was low enough -- I got an apartment for 800 bucks a month -- I could do independent movies and Off-Broadway theater. And that’s what I wanted to do.”
That’s what he did do too. Shakespeare at The Public; Mike Leigh’s Ecstacy at The Houseman, as well as a slew of small roles in large films (Far and Away, The Last of the Mohicans, Natural Born Killers); larger roles in smaller films (Dead Man, Smoke, Blue in the Face); and an indie star turn (the titular target in I Shot Andy Warhol).
“It was a great time to be in New York,” remembers Harris. “And though my building would occasionally stink of dead animals after the exterminator had visited the downstairs burger joint, it was all-in-all a good place to live. Todd Barry lived there. Sarah Silverman lived there. There was a tranny whorehouse on one floor; a crack house on another...” Harris even did some work with Rosie Perez at PS 122 and got to workshop Oedipus Rex and Salome with Al Pacino at the Actor’s Studio. You don’t get more prime New York than that.