Martin Freeman names the greatest antihero of all time: “He’s also a complete twat”
If you’d have told someone in the early 2000s that Martin Freeman, the guy from The Office and Ali G Indahouse, would go on to become a multi-award-winning star with movies that have grossed billions of dollars in his repertoire, they’d have laughed in your face.
From playing a porn star in Love Actually to leading a trilogy of movies set in Peter Jackson’s Middle-earth, Freeman has come an incredibly long way since he first put that stapler in the jelly.
In 2014, Freeman starred in the first season of a TV show that would go on to become another massive hit. Inspired by the Coen brothers’ movie of the same name, the first season of Fargo cast the Englishman as Lester Nygaard, a weedy insurance salesman. Not much happens in Lester’s life until he meets Lorne Malvo, played by Billy Bob Thornton, a hitman who drifts into his small Minnesota town.
Malvo represents a particular type of character that was all the rage with TV showrunners at the time: the anti-hero. He’s a ruthless killer, but one who is framed in such a way that the audience is supposed to identify with him. As Freeman explained in an interview with Digital Spy, he believes one character in particular helped inform Malvo and every other character of his ilk.
“I put the trend back to Tony Soprano,” he opined, “Obviously, anti-heroes have been around since the Greek theatre, but in this last round of American televisual anti-heroes, he was the original and best. I don’t think it’s ever been done better than that. That’s the best television I’ve ever seen.”
If you somehow don’t know, Tony Soprano, played by the much-missed James Gandolfini, is the main protagonist of The Sopranos. To the public, he’s the head of a lucrative waste disposal business, but he’s actually a bloodthirsty criminal mastermind and part of one of the most powerful mafia families in New Jersey.
The hero part of his “anti-hero” image comes from the fact that he’s in therapy, and it is through his conversations with Lorraine Bracco’s Dr Jennifer Melfi that we learn more about the actual person behind the terrible acts, the man behind the monster, if you will.
As Freeman said, anti-heroes have existed long before The Sopranos, but there is something to be said about the impact Tony and the show at large have had on modern culture, where the entire landscape of TV shifted towards presenting such characters as complex individuals. People who would have been viewed as villains a few years ago are now seen as multi-layered badasses who are meant to feed into viewers’ darkest desires, and you only have to look at the success of shows like Boardwalk Empire, House of Cards, and Breaking Bad for proof.
Freeman is a long-time cheerleader for The Sopranos, and his love of Tony is a big part of the series’ appeal, as he added, “You want to be on his side, you want him to do OK because he’s providing for his family and all that, but he’s also a complete twat”.
