DD, Natascha McElhone, and Chemistry
(Parallels to The X-Files)
Felt a little like The Twilight Zone reading about another green-to-tv British actress sharing chemistry with DD.
Goes to show that some aspects are inherent to the business (and art) of acting, no matter who you're across from.
October 3, 2012:
Californication Stars Redefine Chemistry
Sometimes chemistry surfaces in a gaze, or even a glance. It’s true for the self-indulgent novelist Hank Moody and his longtime, long-suffering love/baby mama Karen van der Beek, the on-again, off-again nexus of Showtime’s sexy, LA-centric comedy Californication. And it’s true for the actors who play them, David Duchovny and Natascha McElhone. “Even just the looks they throw each other,” says the show’s creator, executive producer and sole writer Tom Kapinos. “It’s like you believe that this is a couple who have been in love for a long time and can’t quite shake each other.”
The difference, of course, is that Hank and Karen’s magnetic attraction is fueled by a rocky but always intertwined history, a shared child, codependence, and mind-blowing sex. Duchovny and McElhone’s spark comes simply from two actors savoring each scene—funny, sexy, or sad—they share together....
“Natascha and I have just been able to have a very easy working relationship, and I didn’t know that was going to be the case because I didn’t know Natascha and I didn’t know anything was going to work” says Duchovny, whose only insight as to why their particular back-and-forth frisson succeeds is because they make it work. “People talk about chemistry. I always think it’s your job to make it happen if it’s not there, to create it—that’s what an actor is supposed to do.”
McElhone doesn’t try to analyze it too deeply, either. “How do you define chemistry anyway?” she wonders aloud in the British accent she casts aside for the character. “You can’t really analyze it for real. You can’t break it down into its component parts. And if you do, then of course it’ll evaporate,” she says.
“We don’t hang out or have an overly established, entwined friendship so it keeps it really about the work, which is pretty great,” she adds, admitting that at the end of the day both actors generally retreat to their respective families. “We mostly connect as our characters. And I love it like that.”
Whatever they’re doing, it’s working....
“Hank is in love with this woman, he messed it up and he can’t quite get back to it, but that’s what he wants more than anything else. It’s enormously tricky, but somehow in the casting we got it right. I knew we had it right with David, and then Natascha came along and from the pilot you knew they had something.” [Tom Kapinos] says from the outset his leading man “fit so seamlessly into what I wrote in the pilot, a lot of people said, ‘Did you develop this for David Duchovny?’ That wasn’t the case. The script existed way before he [came along], but it’s just one of those really nice, serendipitous examples of actor meeting material and it all fitting together. I just kept writing Hank the way that I knew him and he kept fitting right in there. That said, I started to hear little things in my head that were the way David might do something,” says Kapinos.
“Natascha is a more traditional example of me watching what she was doing, and that definitely informed the character over the years,” he adds. “She was able to give you the sense that she was just slightly out of his league and he was always going to be shooting for her and she would keep him at arm’s length. Somehow we just lucked out there. You go out searching for that and it’s hard to put exactly into words what you’re looking for, but we definitely got it right with those two.”
Evan Handler, who plays Hank’s literary agent and best friend, Charlie Runkle, breaks it down: “They’re both awfully attractive, aren’t they? That never hurts. And look, they’re both good at what they do.” But Handler admits he’s surprised Hank and Karen’s will-they/won’t-they dynamic still fascinates. “It’s been puzzling... to all of us, really. David and I said at the end of shooting the pilot, ‘That was a lot of fun, but how do you get a season out of it?’ Then we said the same thing at the end of the first season: That was a lot of fun, but how do you do more?’ We always kind of laugh that we kept saying that—and yet it’s been more and more.”
BONUS
There were also viewers who felt Karen was getting the short end of the stick and should leave Hank (sound familiar?):
Alternately, McElhone says she’s unchanged by walking in Karen’s hippie-chic shoes—for the most part. “I mean, other than having to do an American accent! Maybe that slightly changes my syntax.” But she’s discovered that many other people feel her character’s romantic travails acutely. “I remember after the first season, someone came up to me, literally took me by the shoulders and shook me and said, ‘You have to leave that guy!’ I was like, ‘It’s okay, I’m not with him. And he doesn’t really exist. It’s a character.’ They’re so attached to it that they overidentify with her plight and they want to rescue her. It was kind of cute…but not really.”
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Californication is so much more than a funny show about a cool, badass (do ppl still say that??) womanizer protagonist. Its also about love and, dare I say, devotion, self destruction, trying to redeem yourself and failling because of old patterns you cannot break. It's about the most miserable, intelligent, caring (in his own way), beautiful and self loathing man ever. In a way, it is brillant.
The level at which Drew Barrymore is fucking up is INSANE
[Image ID: a pair of tweets from from Claire Willett (@clairwillett) from September 11th, 2023 that read:
I know Twitter is not a universal barometer but boy if I was Drew Barrymore’s PR folks I would be gravely concerned about the number of well-known actors on here basically saying “WE WILL NOT BE FORGETTING THIS”
they’ll be skipping your couch on the next press junket, ma’am
unclear if this is a bad-faith question or not but I’ll say that just within the last hour in my own twitter feed I have seen
Joshua Malina
Bradley Whitford
Evan Handler
Anson Mount
Lisa Ann Walter
Roxane Gay
/End ID]
The link in the tweet leads you to the tweet below.
[Image ID: Lisa Ann Walter QT'd (on September 11th, 2023) a tweet of hers from April 17th, 2023 that reads:
Hang out with me & my new sister @DrewBarrymore Tmw!
On @DrewBarrymoreTV
I love her.
And you can tell by my enthusiastic oversharing.
Featuring - the gross recipe me and my High School BFF slapped together.
The tweet includes three tweets with the two of them from Barrymore's show.
The QT reads:
Don’t know why this is going around again-but please note the date: Before both strikes.
I’m a unionist.
I’m proudly re-elected to #SagAftra National & LA Local board. I’m on the NegComm. I chair LA women’s committee and am on WAY too many others. I’m also WGA.
I Don’t X lines
/End ID]
Other tweets that she was talking about:
[Image ID: a tweet from Bradley Whitford on September 11th, 2023 that is a QT of Variety tweeting this article about Drew Barrymore owning the decision to come back and claiming she's not violating strike rules (yes she is because hers is a WGA contracted production). It reads:
Oh, you own it. For sure, @DrewBarrymore. And we’ll never forget it.
/End ID.]
I'm sorry, my anxiety is going up a bit with all of the messiness this post, so I'm not going to do the IDs anymore, and my phone is being mean. But here are others, starting with Evan Handler:
Anson Mount:
Before that he also retweeted Bradley Whitford's tweet, but I'm running out of room.
Roxane Gay:
And there was another one where she rt'd someone basically backhandedly slamming Drew Barrymore for being the host of this year's National Book Awards.
And then, saving the best for last, Joshua Malina has been going scorched earth on Barrymore and reminding people The View is also scabbing. Honestly love seeing it and highly recommend him as someone to follow. A lot of retweets of others as well as original tweets:
He's talking about a hat with the thing that let's custom text scroll. What the person he QT'd is referring to is his hat saying "Drew Barrymore is a Scab".
He actually started hounding her on Sunday, after it was announced very late in the day that she was coming back on Monday.
I love Josh Malina.
Fuck Drew Barrymore.
Also, fuck every celebrity who crosses the picket lines. (This includes Oprah (who also hasn't donated any or her billions to Maui and instead asked others to donate even though she also has a home there which she got through shady deals and wouldn't let anyone use it as a shelter in an emergency) and Brook Shield's who went today.)
(Also fuck other celebs who liked Drew's post about coming back including Lily Collins, Cara Delevingne, Jennifer Aniston, Kristen Bell, and Jennifer Garner and I'm honestly not surprised by the four of those, don't know enough about the first one.)
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