Quit after five minutes. I hate people acting like assholes for no particular reason. Didn’t even wait to finish the scene, since it was obvious where it was going.
(Thus was him “making suggestions” about his role.)
Who was acting like an asshole?
I’m not sure I liked Wonder Man all that much and I really like the Slattery character.
It was…unusual.
The main character.
I don’t see how that can be characterized as acting like an asshole.
He was definitely being difficult which was by design. The character needs an arc and a place from which to grow. Doesn’t everyone know someone who gets in their own way?
Simon was an asshole for episodes 1-7, excluding episode 4 as he was barely in it. I’m not sure whether we were supposed to be rooting for him, I certainly wasn’t. Him getting the Wonder Man part, based on what we saw, is inexplicible.
How do you think life is going to turn out for the guard who introduced “Alfonso” who nobody else has ever heard of, and then suddenly got transferred a lot of money?
I thought he was annoying on the set of American Horror Story, but i can’t imagine why that is considered being an asshole. They could have shut him down at any point with a simple “we are just doing the scene as written”, but nobody had the balls. At no point in any other episode did he do anything assholish.
Yeah, the one woman on set in that first scene calls him a bozo, and I think that’s more fitting. He’s clearly a talented actor who’s going way overboard on a small role, which is annoying, but is also the kind of thing the director should put a stop to.
Him getting the part I don’t find inexplicable at all. His acting that we see is excellent: the audition in ep 1, the self-tape with Trevor in ep 2, and the final bit at the director’s house. And in-universe he’s considered a good actor too - the American Horror people say he had a great audition, his agent thinks he’s good, etc.
The last bit with the guard getting a bunch of money - yeah, that would probably arouse suspicion. That whole thing felt like an add-on epilogue and I’m ok with a bit of hand-waving to get to Trevor’s escape. It doesn’t really need to be like a heist movie at that point.
So I know this is not the case in the comics but Simon’s gonna be a Mutant right?
It’s the only thing that would make sense.
Me too! The way that the director strung him along and at no point said that he was giving too many notes, or warned him that they were running out of time. Instead, kept encouraging him until he got fired out of nowhere. Extremely unprofessional, that director has no place behind the camera.
It really made me feel for the protagonist in that moment.
I don’t think so. Note that his dad is gone but there is no explanation as to what happened to him. And the incident with the stove happened after his dad was gone. My WAG is that whatever took his dad’s life was what gave him powers.
He might certainly be a mutant, sure, but I feel like there was a reason they omitted both what happened to his dad and the reason why he has powers.
You see, I had the opposite reaction. It was the protagonist’s actions that turned me off. He was being stupid (perhaps that was a better term than “asshole”). I didn’t even get to the point where he was fired; I knew it was leading to that.
The man was taking a bit part. One suggestion, well, maybe, but when he went on to do a second, what would he think was going to happen?
His job was to read his lines and hit his marks. He should refrain from making suggestions to the director, especially to only fine-tune the character. Supposedly he had acting experience and should have known better. But the whole scene was clumsily contrived to build sympathy for him. It worked the opposite for me.
I don’t give superhero movies or TV shows a lot of slack to begin with, so that pooly contrived scene was enough for me.
Agreed that it was dumb, and it was supposed to be. That was the point. It’s a shame you gave up so quickly, because his journey as an actor was part of it.
Actually, I think it was supposed to be the opposite; you’re supposed to see that he brought it on himself.
On the other hand, I listen to podcasts from people in the entertainment industry. What happened with Simon is very realistic. In fact, as I was watching it, all I could think of was when Melissa O’Neil was a guest on Once We Were Spacemen, and talking with Nathan Fillion about their time on The Rookie. And how Melissa tends to get hyper-focused on details, which is often a good thing. One example was in the first episode, when they were getting their police gear to take on patrol, she questioned why they would grab their gear themselves rather than having it handed to them by the folks they were checking out with. And they agreed that it made more sense and made the scene more realistic, and changed how they’d do those sorts of scenes going forward. A tiny detail, but those little details add up and help make a show better.
On the flip side, there are multiple times that Nathan had to take Melissa aside and tell her, hey, we’re trying to make a TV show. We don’t have to get every detail perfect, and we can’t. And we have a limited amount of time to get our scenes in. So sometimes, you’re going to have to let things go. And she takes those suggestions well, and they’ve reached a good balance. It was exactly like what they should have done with Simon.
But I agree it was contrived, even if I’m looking at it from the opposite viewpoint. They wasted so much time by humoring him. By bringing in the writer or producer or whoever that person was supposed to be. That director seemed to be unwilling to direct; it’s literally their job to get the scene made how it’s supposed to. And a director should shut down unnecessary stuff and set the tone, and tell the actor “no”. Especially a bit part actor. Maybe if he was a lead, the director would be dealing with studio politics, and humoring him, and all that. But that should have been a quick “we don’t have time for this, thank you but we are going with the script as written”. If he pushed back on that and refused to do the scene, then he’s an asshole and deserves to be fired. Instead, he was just someone who was trying to make the most of his role, was getting into his own head too much (which is a major character trait of his, an important theme of the series), and was strung along and encouraged while he failed to pick up on proper social cues. (The character really struggles with relationships, and just generally interacting with other people, and is portrayed as never having friends as a child or as an adult until Trevor comes along.)
The moment was extremely cringeworthy, I get that. I think it was supposed to be. It made me uncomfortable to watch. It’s a shame it was too much for you and you couldn’t watch more, but I understand. Simon does make other poor decisions that will make you cringe as well, so if it bothers you that much, you’re probably not going to enjoy the series.
I think that was the point, they were showing EVERYONE is some kind of fucked up in Hollywood.
I don’t know how you could watch that American Horror Story scene and think you’re supposed to be on Simon’s side. The entire point of the scene is to show us his flaws. It’s cringe comedy (which I understand is not everyone’s taste).