Team Experience has been sharing our FYCs for the Emmys. With voting ending today here's our last plea from Deborah Lipp...
Suranne Jones, you have stolen my heart. To be fair, it’s Anne Lister who has stolen my heart, but Jones breathes such extraordinary life into the character, that I cannot separate them. Yes, I love the historical figure of Anne Lister, whoever she might have been in real life, but I love this Anne Lister, and that is all due to Suranne Jones.
Anyone familiar with my writing knows I do not attempt to remove my personal slant from my reviews. I don’t believe in it, to be honest. We all bring ourselves to the viewing experience, and we color what we see with what we bring to seeing. I write this rave review as myself, a queer woman married to the fantastically butch Professor Spouse...
Queer women, and lesbian* romances, have begun to be visible on TV. But I have never seen TV do a butch/femme romance, a specific subset that every queer woman has seen in real life. And to see it in Gentleman Jack is to see it illuminated. (*I use Autostraddle’s definition here—“lesbian” is an adjective referring to the relationship, without commenting on the orientation or identity of the individual women.)
A butch is a particular being in this world; one almost never seen on TV or in the movies. Big Boo has long been my favorite Orange is the New Black character—a butch portrayed by a butch. I love these women wholeheartedly, they are gender warriors, with no social clout, with nothing but the enormous risk of expressing themselves, and the inner strength to do so.
Which brings us back to Suranne Jones. Part of the challenge of envisioning Anne Lister is getting the body language right, so that no matter how dressed up and femmed-up she is, we know exactly who and what is underneath the feathered hat. Jones has mastered the walk, the stance, the hand gestures, the gaze, of being “mannish” in a woman’s body. Every time she walks into a room, the room turns queer AF.
But the role of Anne Lister gives Jones a lot more to do than walk into rooms. Anne is full of so much feeling, but is most often compelled to suppress it. She has to carry it just below the surface, remaining cool and commanding. We, the audience, must know how much she feels, but the other characters (her sister, her enemies in the coal business, her tenants, and sometimes her lovers) must not. Jones lets us see that. We see a character who is, in fact, smart, imperious, and in control. It’s her nature and she has no goal of suppressing that. There’s an ease with which she is the smartest person in the room that is an absolute delight. She has that bafflement smart people sometimes have: Why isn’t everyone else playing along? As well, she has the snobbishness, in part because she is a snob, and in part because she cannot believe that the people she knows in her provincial town can possibly be her equals. At the same time, she has the knowledge that she is constantly being underestimated, or challenged, or hated, because she is a woman doing these things. Jones gives us all of it: Both the ease and the tension, both the pleasure in being smart, and the anguish of being marginalized.
But the heart and soul of Suranne Jones’s portrayal, and indeed of the series, is the romance between Anne Lister and Ann Walker, and here, indeed, is where Jones should get all the Emmys. I am so afraid of spoiling anything here. I know an FYC can easily be full of spoilers with a polite warning, but if you haven’t seen this show, I want so badly for you to see it that I will write without spoilers. Because you, too, might have your heart stolen.
Jones walks through an awakening love, through heartbreak, through the simple pain of knowing that even offering love to another woman is a kind of madness in 1830s England, an enormous risk and an invitation to relentless scorn. Anne lives with it, but to ask someone else to do so? Sometimes she plows in and demands the world accede to her, but sometimes she realizes how hard it all is. One scene in particular, is so tender, so heartbreaking, so perfectly true, that I wanted to reach through my television to dry Anne’s tears.
This is, quite simply, a masterpiece of acting. It is as raw and open as it is controlled. Jones is aided, obviously, by a magnificent script and gifted co-stars, but her performance is singular.
For a strong and realistic portrayal of a character that populates real life, but is as rare as a unicorn on TV, for a moving and emotionally raw portrayal of a tightly-controlled character, for soaring romance and tenderness, consider Suranne Jones as Best Actress.
