- The second episode of HBO's Watchmen featured a bizarre stage performance.
- Actor Jeremy Irons tells us about his character's motivations.
- The play also foreshadows a potential character revival from the comic.
Already the most bizarre and (so far) inexplicable plot line of HBO’s Watchmen involves Jeremy Irons' character (referred to in subtitles and promotional materials as "Lord of a Country Manor'). Is he isolated? Is he trapped? Is he bored? He rides around his castle estate on horseback. He celebrates a birthday-like dinner alone, beside two human servants, Mr. Phillips and Mrs. Crookshanks. In the second episode, he puts on a wild play where people, well, die. Irons' character applauds. What is going on?
“I think he's just trying to remind himself of what has happened,” Irons told Men’s Health, trying not to give anything away. “Fill up an evening. He's not a very good playwright. . . . Not a good director.”
Irons began his career in theater and on the London stage. He won a Tony Award in 1984 during his Broadway debut in The Real Thing. Unlike his character, Irons actually knows theater, a fact which gives the sequence an added layer of hilarity; Jeremy Irons would never applaud such a performance.
“I thought the dialogue was pretty wooden,” he went on, enjoying himself. “But [my character] doesn't have great actors.”
After the play, the actor, Mr. Phillips and Mrs. Crookshanks, are revealed to be clone copies of various other Mr. Phillips and Mrs. Crookshanks. The revelation plays out very similarly to another clone-reveal in the Watchmen graphic novel, where the character Adrian Veidt, Ozymandias, the smartest man alive, allows AI robots to be frozen to death in his Antarctic lair (Watchmen, page 360). HBO’s Watchmen has yet to identify Irons’ character, but it’s pretty clear by now who this mystery man will be. The phrase he mutters after the play—“nothing ever ends”—that was the last thing Dr. Manhattan told Veidt at the end of the comic before he returned to Mars.
Since the play Veidt puts on essentially recreates Dr. Manhattan’s origin story, we may be anticipating a reunion between the two former masked heroes.
Until then, the mystery man will continue “filling time,” as Irons says. And, apparently, filling body bags.
