Watchmen’s Jean Smart revealed what she enjoyed most about playing Laurie Blake in the series. The HBO star has been happy to play a role in such an influential show, as is most of the cast involved. Smart sat down with the Los Angeles Times to speak about a number of the factors at play in Watchmen. She told them in no uncertain terms that playing the former vigilante was a “gift.” Smart said, “You’ve got to see so much of her public and totally private moments. It really was a gift as an actor.” The chemistry on screen between Blake and Regina King’s Angela Abar is palpable from their first interaction. While King’s performance has been heralded, its good to remember how well Smart performed in Watchmen too.
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“This is what actors crave. I mean, yes, sometimes you want to do stuff that’s just fun and just entertainment,” the actress shared. “But there was a quote from an actor a long time ago that said, ‘As an actor, if you want to believe that you can affect people in your audience in a good way, in a positive way, open their eyes to something.’”
“You also have to accept the fact that you can be a negative influence as well. You have to make your own personal wise choices about the kind of material you do. So you get to do something like “Watchmen,” it’s extremely rewarding,” she continued. “And it was nice that the audience responded the way it did. Of course, we had no idea what was coming. Like I said, it’s prophetic to an alarming degree. We had no idea about the pandemic. We had no idea how the race relations were going to come to a head in 2020.”
Her co-star Yahya Abdul-Mateen II also said that this felt like a dream come true for him. He told Deadline about the joys of playing Doctor Manhattan last week.
“So, this job, for me, was really an actor’s dream. I got to do a lot of character work. I got to do work that was rooted in very important history, but I got to do physical work; I got to do vocal work, and really challenge myself to test my limits, so that I could show as much variety as the story required, and that was really an actor’s gift for myself, to be able to flex those muscles a bit,” he said.
Who was your favorite character in HBO’s Watchmen? Let us know down in the comments!
