Help, Kari Matchett

I've found another thread on here which answers some of my questions. Though does anyone find it really distracting that so many important characters are played by the same actors? I just can't image Lily Rowan and Carla Lovchen played by the actress.

Also, I saw someone mentioned 'campiness' in the acting stake. I hate camp acting, so is it very prominent?

Using an ensemble cast to play non-recurring roles, like a repertory theater company, is one of the unique achievements of "Nero Wolfe." The concept is virtually unheard of in television these days, but it takes only an episode or two to catch what's going on and get a charge out of it. Kari Matchett was particularly singled out by fans and critics, and she explained what was going on in a couple of interviews at the start of the second season.

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Actress adds more than dimples to A&E series 'Nero Wolfe'
Jean Prescott, The Sun Herald (Mississippi)
April 12, 2002

Kari Matchett has dimples that keep dimpling long after her smile is gone. They reinforce the blond-bombshell image but belie the intelligence of her latest American TV character. She plays Julie Jaquette, "an illicit young lady" in frosted pink lipstick, and for all of her short-skirted, white-booted flooziness, she impresses "Nero Wolfe" in the second-season opener of that A&E Network series (8 p.m. ET Sunday).

"Honest to God, I used to think, 'If only I could step back in time and do one of those old Katharine Hepburn or Rosalind Russell movies,' " Matchett said, "and here I am (in 'Nero Wolfe') doing that '40s movie kind of thing."

She was calling from her home in Toronto, where a late winter storm dropped a tree on her fence while dropping the temperature 50 degrees overnight. The squashed-fence distraction was brief, though, and she turned quickly to "Nero Wolfe" and what she loves about her part in its carefully assembled ensemble cast.

"I don't think this could be more perfect," she said, "the opportunity to work like a theatrical company in a TV setting.

"All the actors have such creative juices," she said. The unmistakably '40s-'50s tone of the dialogue "gives the actors enough words to chew on ... which is a change from the modern sensibility that everything has to be real to be interesting."

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Matchett has Wolfe at her door
Toronto Star
April 14, 2002

Boy George be damned. Kari Matchett is the quintessential karma chameleon -- and she wears less makeup.

Matchett not only appears in the second season opener of Nero Wolfe tonight at 8 on A&E, she has two roles. She plays Lily Rowan, Archie Goodwin's putative girlfriend -- a brunette -- and flashy blonde singer/go-go dancer Julie Jacquette. Julie helps Goodwin (Timothy Hutton) and Wolfe (Maury Chaykin) solve the murder of a "kept woman." The catch is that the suspected murderer, Orrie Cather, played by cutie patootie Trent McMullen (Last Night), happens to be a good friend of Goodwin's. ...

Matchett has shot 11 Nero episodes and credits the variety of the characters as the big draw. "It's the beautiful chunky roles," she allows. "I read the scripts and felt, this is a dream. It is Katharine Hepburn/Cary Grant stuff from The Philadelphia Story. I fell in love with the sensibility of the characters and the era (the '50s and '60s).

"I play a different character in every episode, and they look vastly different. One was a blonde, perky character. In the next one, I had a drinking problem. The next one, I had nondescript hair and had an accent. The one I'm working on now, I'm a redhead."

In tonight's episode, she plays Julie Jacquette as a childlike beatnik.

"She's wild," Matchett says. "She has heavy makeup and recites beat poetry. She works in a club called Ten Little Indians where she sings with a bad voice, and she has Nero wrapped around her finger. She is open, a big, grown-up kid. She has no sophistication. She laughs, tells jokes and really has fun."

Lily is Julie's flip side.

"Lily is the coolest woman in existence," Matchett enthuses. "She lives on the top of the Ritz and is incredibly smart."

Matchett goes from frump to flapper and from saint to sinner: She's been killed off once, and she was the killer once. And she gets to do it with great hair and wardrobe.

"I wear the gamut -- from horn-rimmed glasses to fun hats with a feather that stuck straight up. You know Rex Stout loves women because he describes what a woman wears.

"Playing a different character in each episode means you are never bored or stereotyped. I read the script over and over until the character becomes clear, then I work on the vision, speech and walk, and the physicality emerges."

Matchett confesses that Julie is her favourite character thus far. She doesn't have the same affinity for sci-fi, in which she gets invariably cast. She played dual roles in the sci-fi series Earth: Final Conflict.

"Sci-fi is anti-human, not flesh and blood," she says. "They're all talking heads. It's not about attraction or vibration or how we live our lives.

"And I hate the clothes and the shoes. We've seen the one-piece jumpsuit; we don't need to see it again."

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On the A&E discussion board for "Nero Wolfe," almost instantly after the first time "Immune to Murder" aired, a fan posting with the name "Dinky Byne" put up a comprehensive list of the actors (61 in the rep cast, by his count) and the characters they played throughout the series. It must have been quite a labor of love for Dinky; naturally, it's gone at A&E, now, but the Wolfe Pack has preserved it. Scroll down for Dinky Byne's list:

http://www.nerowolfe.org/nwm/nwm_cast/cast-home.htm

Michael Jaffe, executive producer of "Nero Wolfe," spoke to the Wolfe Pack in December 2001. He ended his remarks this way: "What distinguishes this series from any other that has been on the air is that we use only author-written material, and we chose early on to use a repertory of actors so you'll see many of the same actors come back and play multiple roles. That's worked out for us because a lot of actors come from the be-a-cigarette school of acting, everything is very dramatic. It's really hard to find actors who just have fun with the material so when we do, and we put a lot of energy into finding them, we try to do just that."

When I first saw the series, I knew scarcely of the existence of the novels let alone anything about this production, in particular the repertory cast. It has been a habit of mine, perhaps inadvertently to having an oddly decent memory for such things, to pick out actors that have been used in various roles over the course of Tv series. On a long running show, perhaps something like a police procedural (with several 'new' characters for every episode) such things are unavoidable.

Upom viewing a couple of episodes (possibly about 3 episodes apart from one another in the first season, attributable to it being screened at a time I could not always watch it due to shift work) I noticed a couple of actors being re-used. I'm used to this of course of the long run of other series, but so close together? Once a few episodes had been seen, it was then obvious (and some internet digging of course elaborated upon it) that a repertory cast was being used.

I think that by the end of the first season, it became somewhat of a guilty pleasure to tune in to each episode, as and when possible, not only for the story itself, but to see the actors re-invent themselves playing new characters.

Despite it being a murder mystery, and a bit of an exercise for the viewers to try and unravel some if not all of the subtle nuances and clues to solve the crime before the final act, one would have to be honest and say that the show had at least equally as much strength as an intelligent/quirky comedy. Some of the melee over the preparation and ingredients of various dishes, to the few episodes that saw Wolfe out of his residence, and as such very much out of his element, were quite enjoyable.

So in the context of all that, I actually _preferred_ the repertory cast. In no small way would that be due to the fact that (at least for the most part) the cast in question seems to have been well chosen and have performed well, rather than some perfunctory performances I've seen in more mainstream drama.

And so on to Kari Matchett, and her (even by the NW standards) frequent appearances, even to the extent of more than one role in the very same episode. Well, what can one say, she certainly isn't harsh to watch on screen (and generally that'd be about the last thing that would interest me as far as an actor or actress goes) and seems to have been able to develop a uniqueness to each character that she played, rather than just a case of 'oh that's Kari in a brown wig' or something.

I think James Tolkan appeared at least as often. He is an interesting one, since his face and voice (even if he were to alter the accent itself, the voice is somewhat distinct, with a solid oak like undertone to it) are quite recognisable.

As a last general comment, it seems obvious (to me at least, after having bought and watched the series again, over a much shorter timespan) that aside from each episode (even if they might have been set in slightly non chronological order) uncovering a slightly more intimate portrait of the main characters and their relationships with one another, well, it seems obvious that the cast seemed to really be having a good time playing the roles, and in a sense, be it due to a sense of family/community, or a regular paycheck for the extent of the series, whatever, they seemed to really get into it. And in a good way, not in the (imho) self indulgent way that saw the decline of Jerry Lewis' pictures in the mid-late 60s ('way way out' comes to mind as the epitome of such). Although it was a completely different genre and style, and clearly far far shorter lived, I gleaned the same sort of camaraderie amongst the cast of 'firefly'

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