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In 2023, after Succession ended following four Emmy-winning seasons, Matthew Macfadyen had what he described as “the actor’s worry.” Macfadyen won two Emmys for playing the show’s striving, weaselly son-in-law, Tom Wambsgans, and when it was all over, he says, “You think, ‘God, what do I do now? Nothing will be as good.’”
What Macfadyen found next turned out to be another midwestern American with delusions of grandeur and a tenuous grasp on his own limitations: Charles Guiteau, the man who assassinated President James Garfield in 1881 and has since been lost to history — until being resurrected on the Netflix limited series Death by Lightning. Making the four-episode series from creator Mike Makowsky (an Emmy winner for Bad Education) appealed to Macfadyen because it had a set beginning and end, unlike Succession, and was filmed relatively close to his home in London, recreating 19th-century America on the streets of Budapest. But there was another appeal that I, at least, could not have predicted.
“I really liked my beard,” Macfadyen, 51, tells me on today’s episode of the Prestige Junkie podcast. “It’s like wearing a hat, it just changes your face. And then you shave, and it’s terrifying because your face looks sort of like an egg. Your upper lip looks really insubstantial, and that upsets your offspring.”
I’m a huge fan of Death by Lightning, which looks back at politics in the 1880s to find it’s just as much of a cesspool of selfishness and greed as it is today, if not even more. Macfadyen’s wild-eyed Guiteau never actually ascends to any power, but the men who actually possess it — like Shea Whigham’s pugnacious Roscoe Conkling or Nick Offerman’s bruiser Chester A. Arthur, who seems as shocked as anyone to eventually become the 21st president — are no wiser or better-hearted. The enormous exception turns out to be James Garfield himself, played by a beautifully restrained Michael Shannon as someone who actually wants to be president for the right reasons — not that it does him any good in the end.
“It didn’t feel like a period piece,” Macfadyen, who was born in England, tells me. “Human behavior hasn’t really changed. Conventions change, clothes change and manners change, to a degree. But the nuts and bolts of what we do, and what we want — the driving forces — are the same, aren’t they?”
Macfadyen tells me how he dug into playing someone who, by modern standards, would be considered mentally ill, yet who also remains oddly endearing in his misplaced efforts to make his own mark on America. And he goes deep on the realities of being an actor “bouncing from job to job,” and accepting the lack of control that comes with that.
“I think the only way I can operate is just to sort of bumble along,” he tells me. “I’m always amazed when people say it’s going really well — like they can trace a through line. And I’m like, that doesn’t make any sense.”
Hear much more from Macfadyen on today’s episode of the Prestige Junkie podcast, which also includes my conversation with Vanity Fair’s Chris Murphy about the new season of Euphoria, and whether Zendaya can take home a third Emmy in the midst of what’s already shaping up to be her banner year.
