armandposting

Assad, after the revelations of the previous season, I wonder if you consider Armand as a villain of the story now, or maybe I'm not fair and that he's just one of many ambiguous characters of the show.

ASSAD: As an actor, it's not the– I don't know, I don't think it's wise for me to think of Armand as a villain. I have to go in thinking– figuring who Armand is as a human being. When you think of someone as a villain, you can almost think that they're a god. You deify them in some way. You put them on a pedestal or put them on a thing that makes them– simplifies them too much. So to me, Armand is just a person, who has gone through very very difficult circumstances, and has become– those have shaped him to who he is, and I'm still working out a lot of things about who he is. It's interesting, I don't know if Eric and Jacob also find this, but watching after each season and learning from the last season and watching where it's going, I constantly find new things even after the show is done, even after we finish filming. And I guess maybe that's a part of playing a character for going on 4 years now; we've lived with these characters and almost always kind of ruminating in some way. We finished filming in December, and still every now and again Armand pops into my head: a little moment will pop into my head, something that we filmed or something that we're yet to film or yet to explore and I'll be like, oh, that's interesting... I wonder what Armand would do in that situation, or who he would be. I forgot your question in that answer. I'm so sorry, but I hope that there's something there.

JACOB: So to answer your question as well, I do want to say something about Armand quickly! Because I give Armand so much shit when I talk about the show all the time. And he is probably the character that I, Jacob, watch and I'm like, that guy gets on my nerves, he just seems to kind of get things wrong at every stage... But I think something that this season goes into in a really powerful way, and I think kind of reframes a lot of what you see of him before is that, he's almost– He's what happens if you go through some of the worst personal atrocities from a very young age. So much cruelty is inflicted on you, and then you're just alone. And he tries to, I feel, Armand is continually trying to find community. And so, in one way it manifests in religious fundamentalism and, you know, this really dark sort of cult kind of thing... he tries to control people. And then he just sort of tries to find that– Louis becomes a bit of a weird sort of religious figure to him at some point. And then he's trying to recreate this diet– this horrific dynamic that was inflicted on him from a very young age. And so I think there is a way that you can look at Armand and be like, that guy's evil, his behaviour's not cool on any level. But I think something that our show does really well is that there is a version of every single one of these characters –including Claudia, including Madeleine even– they would be the villain in a lesser story. But we spend the time on getting to know all of these characters and understanding why they make these decisions they make. And I think it's quite easy to sort of pin the villain pin on Armand. And I am guilty of doing it myself. But actually, between Assad and Rolin and Hannah, I think he becomes in this season an even more fully formed, fully understandable character.

ASSAD: That's the other thing though; that the show is not about heroes and villains. I say that fully knowing that we are kind of flagshipping a villain for the future. But none of these characters are heroes or villains. And I don't think that Rolin and Hannah, or even Anne Rice, was ever interested in boxing any of these characters into good and evil. She was exploring the nature of humanity through characters who can live through ages and what that does. So yeah, short answer: no, he's not a villain. But he's not a hero either.