The uber-masculine caped and coated Thomas Cromwell

How actors bring themselves to a role.

I started watching Wolf Hall last night on PBS. It’s good. It’s more than good. It lacks the pure entertainment value that Poldark and Downton Abbey have; such entertainment value perhaps aligns more with my taste. And thus I found myself at frequent intervals stopping the video and doing Internet searches on this palace, on that palace, on who Ann Boleyn’s family was, on “sweating sickness.” But the three things that are incredible: they shoot nighttime scenes by candlelight, the costumes, especially the uber-masculine caped and coated Renaissance outfits worn by Thomas Cromwell and King Henry VIII, and Mark Rylance’s performance as Cromwell. I start to see more and more how actors really do bring themselves to a role. Rylance brings this mix of quiet trickster intelligence and moral penetration that make me think: who else could play this role? Jonathan Pryce, meanwhile, as Cardinal Wolsey, has a moral and sexual ambiguity, and a gratuitously extraverted hunger for power, that make him well-suited for a cardinal: the cardinals are the Catholic Church’s politicians. I think too of Pryce in Miss Saigon: another morally ambiguous gratuitously extraverted character, i.e., the Engineer.

Humanity has always faced epidemics.

Sweating sickness was an epidemic that struck England and continental Europe in several waves in the 15th and 16th centuries. Without going into the details of how Cromwell’s wife and two daughters get ill and die, all in a morning while he steps out of the house, it reminds one that there have been epidemics throughout history. It’s a human thing we’ve always dealt with. The most recent prior to COVID-19 that has had the same import was AIDS, but even AIDS was the epidemic of gay men, prostitutes, intravenous drug users, and sub-Saharan Africans. Sweating sickness, like COVID-19, seems to have able to strike anyone (and even the young, healthy, and wealthy apparently). That colors life: the thought that anyone could be struck down. While I scourn the senselessness of COVID-19 just taking people for no reason, it’s humbling, and humbles everyone, that there is no person immune from sickness death, not even the uber-titans heading the technology and social media companies upon which we’ve all become even more reliant as we’re forced to keep our distance from each other.