#the data

I've said this before, but this bears repeating because holy shit y'all

(Intro here, data and graphs here)

When I first started noticing how often Colin Firth got wet I questioned, was it because of Pride and Prejudice? Did the decision to put him in a wet shirt in 1995 alter the course of his career?

Well, NO. My hypothesis was wrong. He had five projects in the ten years before 1995, including Valmont which also put him in a wet white shirt. He already had an established career in wetness. Pride and Prejudice didn't influence him.

Instead,

Colin Firth influenced Pride & Prejudice

Before 1995? ZERO wet Darcys.

After 1995? MOST Darcys get wet! I watched 19 post 1995 adaptations with a Darcy character, and 13 of them got that Darcy wet. That's 68%! In at least two where they didn't get wet, they alluded to it!

I don't have stats either, but I've read >650 P&P adaptations and even in a non-visual medium, it's a trope to get Darcy wet.

Colin Firth’s trend of getting wet is so powerful it permanently altered the public perception of a 200 year old character

And! Now there are homages!

I have tried, but I can't find any better way of showing the graph than just having the obsidian files automatically added to a repository on github. I'm sure I've seen at some point that there is a way of showing the graph there too, but I can't find it now that it's connected. If I do, I'll change it, but for now you have to download it and place it in an obsidian vault if you want to see the graph and be able to click the links to get directly to the note they say they go to. Ignore the plugins installed if you do that, just delete the folder, none of them are used in the graph.

((Also, I didn't say it before, but pelipper mail and magic anons are on, but I will ignore magic anons if they go against what I want to do with the character (I don't think it will happen often, but still).))

Here's what I look like:

Log of the changes and whatnot under the cut:

//@whys-rotomblr-hub for anything related to this or any other of my characters.

You can read my intro here.

When I ran the data, Colin Firth had 90 acting credits on IMDB (in 40 years! The man's been busy!)

I wanted to set some parameters, so I excluded anything where the overall project was under an hour of runtime.

(DVD bonus content, short films, one off TV episodes. You'll notice Crown Court is over an hour, but as a one off TV episode, I excluded it as well. PS it was his first onscreen appearance, as a baby face cop)

I also excluded anything where he has <5 minutes of screentime.

(The record might be the 1987 Secret Garden, where he's got about 90 seconds. Honestly forgot I was watching a Colin Firth film until he showed up right before the credits)

I also excluded this

because dear god, no thank you I didn't want to watch that shit (I'm only partially kidding. I'd watched literally everything else so I watched this one too, it wasn't that bad)

This left us with a very respectable 76 films that I tracked data for!

SMOKING

The highest percentage of what I tracked was whether he smoked.

(sidenote, check out that 10 year period where he had TWENTY FOUR PROJECTS)

I assume this is common for anyone who made films in the 80s or 90s, when smoking onscreen was more prevalent. Out of curiosity I broke it up by when the film was set, because he does a lot of period pieces, and found that yes! Things do taper off as the public perception of smoking changed.

(I was very broad with what I considered a "period piece", mostly because I didn't start making this powerpoint until 10pm the night before I presented, because that's who I am as a person) The numbers didn't show for actual movies, but in the 2000s there were only 2 movies where he smoked, out of the 19 that he filmed. Probably because it shifted to instead of everyone or cool kids, only villains and bad guys smoke.

INFIDELITY

I also tracked infidelity, separating out whether his partner was unfaithful to him, or whether he was the one to be unfaithful or help a committed person be unfaithful.

These percentages are of all his movies. He gets cheated on 15.8% of the time, poor guy.

GRIEF

Did you know that in a quarter of his projects, he explores grief?

I determined that there were two main types of grief - the death of an intimate (mostly a partner, occasionally a family member), and wartime PTSD.

But that's not what you're here for. I know you. You wanna see how often he got

WET

THIRTY PERCENT. That is almost every third project!

I separated it out where the water goes on him (rain, shower, fountain, fire hose) or where he goes in the water (ocean, pond, lake, bath). A Single Man is special, because there's a scene where he's in the rain, and a scene where he's in the ocean (and in the credits, he's floating nude underwater, just saying).

That seems like a lot! I don't have any comparison data (yet, waiting for my brain to embark on another unhinged project) but that seems like more than other people.

In 2010, Colin Firth won an Oscar for his performance in The King's Speech.

You may also recognize him from things like

Pride & Prejudice

or the Bridget Jones series

or Love Actually

or Mamma Mia!

or Kingsman

He's talked about how he likes to take roles that were different than the last one he played, and often overlaps jobs, which means that he was alternating filming for Mamma Mia, an Abba musical about a wedding

at the same time that he was filming A Summer in Genoa, a film about dealing with the grief of the death of his partner in a car crash

Not to be confused with Trauma,

a film about dealing with the grief of the death of his partner in a car crash.

Not to be confused with A Single Man,

a film about dealing with the grief of the death of his partner in a car crash.

Not to be confused with Supernova,

a film where he's in the car with his partner, dealing with the grief of his imminent death. Very different.

But that's not what we're here for. The real question is,

How often does Colin Firth get wet??

I found out -

My first unhinged project involved watching all of Colin Firth's IMDB acting credits, to see how often he got wet.

Figured I'd make a master list of the posts I made. I didn't make a post on everything, so if there's one without a link you can always request to hear my thoughts hahaha

I also made a post about his hair choices, because he does a lot of period pieces and oh boy do I often have Thoughts

And here's a post about how his trend of getting wet changed our perception of Darcy forever

I ended up making a powerpoint presentation of my data (that I drunkenly presented to my friends, highly recommend) and put it in posts here: Intro Graphs and Data Influence

Figure I'll throw in the list of kissing movies I got an anon ask for too :)

All the spoilers. All the answers. Don't say I didn't warn you