The 'Death By Lightning' Casting Director Deserves a Raise
A screwball dramedy about the dour James A. Garfield and his kooky assassin--is this my dream show?
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I’m only 1.5 episodes into Netflix’s new limited series, Death By Lightning, so it’s a little premature for a rave, but perhaps not since The Knick have I seen a pilot episode that so made me think “wow, someone made a show just for me.”
Three episodes seems like the minimum required for a review—plenty of good shows have taken that long just to find their stride—but as far as first episodes go, this one was just about perfect. Created by Mike Makowsky, Death By Lightning is a sort-of comedic take on Destiny of the Republic, a 2011 non-fiction bestseller by Candice Millard about 20th president James A. Garfield and the man who eventually assassinated him, Charles Guiteau. Certainly it helps that I was a fan of the source material, but books like this are also notoriously hard to adapt (see: Lost City of Z, In the Heart of the Sea, Unbroken et. al for evidence of this).
Suffice it to say, I’m a sucker for most things set in America’s Beard Era. From 1789-1860, the United States had zero bearded presidents (though John Quincy Adams and Martin Van Buren both had pretty righteous sideburns). From 1860-1913, every president but two (Johnson and McKinley) had bitchin facial hair. It’s such an odd phenomenon, and if these things happen recur in 80-year cycles you’d expect a new bearded age to be upon us, coinciding almost perfectly with this new Gilded Age. Maybe there’s some connection between beards, rampant corruption, mass wealth inequality, the rise of a grifter class and widespread magical thinking (crypto and crystals are the new mesmerism and railroad fraud, and whatnot). Potential thesis idea for someone out there, but I digress.
In terms of tone and casting, Death By Lightning seems to have played Destiny of the Republic perfectly. Michael Shannon plays James Garfield, a haunted Civil War vet and inspired orator who ended up becoming the 1880 Republican presidential nominee essentially by accident. With the party split over factional battles between James G. Blaine (Bradley Whitford) and Roscoe Conkling (Shea Whigham), in the first episode, Garfield gives too good a convention speech for his own chosen nominee, John Sherman (younger brother of William Tecumseh), and his seeming lack of ambition ends up making him seem an ideal compromise candidate. In the days when the convention operated like a top hat conclave, Garfield, Cardinal Lawrence-like takes the nomination on the 36th ballot. If only we could choose our modern-day party leaders this same way. “Candidate who wants it least” seems like a pretty good criteria.
You don’t hear too many speeches from 19th century politicians and think “this mf spittin’”, but Garfield was better than most, and Death By Lightning manages to recreate the best parts of his actual nomination speech (wisely losing most of the stuff defending the gold standard) and condense it into something suitably rousing. If it isn’t quite the barnburner that Clive Owen’s speech is in The Knick pilot (and really, nothing is), it’s mesmerizing to watch Michael Shannon turn Victorian pomposity into something profound by sheer force of will. Can anyone play a man possessed like Michael Shannon? His eyes are made of lava. He’s also one of the tallest actors I’ve seen in real life, and wiry, like a human coyote. He’s not the best physical match for the above-average height, proportionally built Garfield, but if the goal was to embody a dour man that others automatically defer to on strength of presence alone, it’s hard to imagine anyone doing much better.
An even bolder casting choice in Death By Lightning is the character of Charles Guiteau, one of history’s weirdest little guys, known to future ages mainly as America’s least politically motivated presidential assassin. If you’re looking for more Gilded Age parallels, kooky, fame-seeking loner assassins is a nice one. One book about Guiteau, who was, for a time, a member of the free-loving proto commune Oneida community, notes that “[Guiteau]’s nickname among the women of Oneida was ‘Charles Gitout.’”
As such, it’d be tempting to cast Guiteau as some Thomas Crooks-esque little freak (I could see Fred Hechinger crushing this). Death By Lightning instead humanizes Guiteau while maximizing the potential for screwball comedy. Matthew McFadyen, aka Tom Wambsgans from Succession, plays Guiteau. Our modern day maestro of craven careerism, McFadyen is uniquely capable of humanizing our evillest little shits, imbuing even wormy scumbags with an odd dignity. He’s like a cheat code. He can somehow make you hate him, pity him, laugh at him, and empathize all at the same time. Whereas some British actors, like Damian Lewis and Hugh Laurie, do such flawless accent work that they effortlessly read American, McFadyen seems to employ the faintly aristocratic air he naturally gives off in the service of playing pretentious, grandiloquent American strivers. It’s a slightly different thing, but wildly effective.
You know the casting director did an amazing job when I haven’t even brought up Shea Wigham or Nick Offerman yet. Shea Wigham looks like he grew up eating cigarettes and drinks only scalding beverages straight from a metal thermos, a sepia-toned small-town diner photograph made flesh. He sort of reminds me of the grandpa who died when I was five, the one who drove a meat truck, even though Whigham is much younger. Casting the blue collar(-looking) Whigham as the foppish head of a Gilded Age political machine, complete with sumptuous waistcoats and hair like a cock’s comb, is sort of against type, but works beautifully. You figure that’s what these guys must’ve really been like, hard, alcohol-soaked, pre-antibiotics faces under patterned vest and elaborate whiskers. Or maybe it’s just fun because Shea Whigham showing up in anything automatically makes it better.
