By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com
The Next "It' Brit TV Guy: Actor David Tennant
There ought to be a special Emmy award for whoever casts the leading men for PBS’ MASTERPIECE THEATRE and MYSTERY. They’ve found yet another floppy haired, skinny-sexy actor to make thegirls go crazy and turn sexually ambiguous young men into lifelong Anglophiles. He’s David Tennant, a 35 year old Scots-born actor who’ll be all over TV this fall. Tennant plays the lead role in CASANOVA (on PBS Masterpiece Theatre, beginning Sunday Oct. 8) and he is the new incarnation of the SciFi network’s DR. WHO (Fridays at 9pm).
The Los Angeles Times has a look at Tennant in both series. Reporter Robert Lloyd describes Tennant’s cut-glass facial structure as “vulpine,” which is one of those writerly ways of saying that the actor both looks like a wolf and is rather foxy. Without sounding all gay about it. On DR. WHO, his sci fi pal Rose (Billie Piper) describes the hero as Rose characterizes him as “a big old punk with a bit of rockabilly tthrown in.”
Perfect.
Tennant’s another in a long line of what a friend of mine calls Britstuds–those stage-trained, TV drama-seasoned actors who can act the hell out of any role–hero, villain, oddball character type–and steal any movie. (You know who you are, Bill Nighy and Jim Broadbent.)
Before Hollywood discovered Clive Owen and Colin Firth, these actors–tall, dark and posh–were mainstays of PBS crime and costume dramas — the lavish literary adaptations coproduced by the BBC, ITV or Channel 4.
Even Ralph Fiennes, a couple of years before he made his sensational film breakthrough in SCHINDLER’S LIST, caught many eyes with a miniscule role in the first installment of PRIME SUSPECT with Helen Mirren. As a murder victim’s grieving boyfriend, Fiennes appeared in just two scenes, but he was so distractingly, attractively neurotic that audiences assumed, on no evidence whatever, that he had to be guilty of something. Turns out he was marked for stardom: Steven Spielberg caught his performance in PRIME SUSPECT as well as his next British-made film, WUTHERING HEIGHTS, and cast him in