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Jim Moriarty in BBC's 'Sherlock'

posted 14 years ago by TexDoc
9 replies | jump to latest

Just finished watching the last of the three episodes of the first season of "Sherlock" (4 if you count the unreleased pilot, which was excellent). I was having some trepidation about their introduction of the character of Sherlock Holmes' "arch-nemesis" Moriarty, wondering how they could pull it off. I was SO impressed by the character I immediately searched out information on the actor, "Andrew Scott". Brilliantly played, taking an excellent series and managing to uplevel it significantly...exactly the right balance of confidence, edginess, sociopathy and charm. Pushed a "must see" series right into "wouldn't dream of missing". Congratulations to Mr. Scott!!

[–] everlone_2000 13 years ago

The writing from his first appearance in Sherlock in 2010 was from Bafta award winner and multiple Hugo award winner, Steven Moffat!

The actor plays Jim as required by how he character is written and viewed by the director

Well, I agree with all of this and I don't dispute that Stephen Moffat has written some really excellent stuff (as well as some garbage, like Coupling), and that most of his writing in Sherlock is outstanding. But I thought that the Moriarty created by him and Andrew Scott didn't reflect the imagination and control that the Sherlock and Watson characters displayed. In fact, it felt like a shrill imitation of an OTT Hollywood villain; a kind of wackily unpredictable psychopath borrowed from a thousand action films. They didn't really seem to know what to do with him, and their solution was to keep writing more and more lines into his monologues, and have Andrew Scott keep changing the pitch, volume and accent of his delivery, neither of which was a great substitute for effective characterisation.