My growing appreciation of Roger Cross (@theRogerCross , #DarkMatter #Continuum)

My growing appreciation of Roger Cross (@theRogerCross , #DarkMatter #Continuum)
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OK – I know it’s probably daggy (is this word used outside of Australia) to tag the subject of my blog post in the heading so that it will appear on his Twitter feed, but what the heck. I am only just learning all this Twitter stuff (WordPress and Instagram are my normal scenes). Thing is, I am really starting to enjoy seeing Roger Cross in television series and I am happy for him to know it.

So it has only been two series of his I have watched so far (Dark Matter, Continuum), and in the wrong order at that. Nevertheless…

Oh, and I should warn you – yes there will be minor spoilers. Sorry. So don’t read on if you have not seen the shows.

Anyway, I have really enjoyed Dark Matter. For any of my readers who are not into science fiction (yes, we all know who you are), let me just say that Dark Matter has been one of my major television pleasures in recent years (with The Expanse, Killjoys, and Orphan Black). My two favourite character are Six (Roger Cross) and Three (Anthony Lemke). I’ll talk about Three another time because today I will discuss Six and Roger Cross’s interpretation of him.

The character of Six is a strong one. He is the powerful, moral, thoughtful and sensitive – and he is not ashamed to be open about this. His emotions are often on display but there is never any sense of weakness there. Cross makes emotions masculine in much the same way as (and I hope he is not offended by these comparisons) actors like Robert De Niro, Yul Brynner or Al Pacino. I think Cross achieves this through varying the strength and manner of emotional display in each instance. So he picks the scenario and appropriately plays them with subtlety or with strength as required. Sometimes its a look. Sometimes his tone or pacing. It’s probably a lot more than this, but I just enjoy watching him do it. Often its like you can really feel him suppressing the power of the emotions within him. Here is the spoiler: I particularly enjoyed watching the character’s internal struggle at the beginning of the second season following his so-called betrayal of the team.

Anyway, I thought that as I was waiting for more seasons to appear of my favourite shows, I may as well look at other shows that have some enjoyable actors in them. And behold Continuum, with Roger Cross.

Cross plays the uber-bad guy Travis Verta in this time travelling saga. It’s great! Here I see all the bad-assery (is this an actual word?) that Cross so successfully suppresses when playing Six. This is one dude that I would not want to meet in a dark alley. To be honest, for a while at the beginning I thought that the characterisation was a bit one dimensional. Then, as the story unfolded, I realised that we (the audience) were meant to think of the bad guys as nothing more than cardboard villains at that stage of the series. The writers were so clever. They really wanted to screw with our brains over the nature of good and bad by revealing the story of each villain very, very slowly. Hence, (spoilers) at one point in Season Three I was watching Travis with his daughter, feeling the tenderness and love, and then feeling so sad when the future cops crash the situation and his daughter betrays him. I can really understand now the anger that Cross so successfully has underlying all of Travis’ behaviour, even when Travis is supposedly calm.

So now I am reading his entry in Wikipedia and (apart from realising that I am becoming some sort of fan-boy cyber stalker) being amazed by all the shows that he has been in. How come I don’t recognise him from those four episodes of the X-Files? I loved the X-Files! Ah, but the more I read that list the more I realise I have not watched a lot of those shows. Admittedly, my television viewing did take a dive during the course of four part-time university degrees supported by full-time jobs. Yep – no real need to say that – I’m just boasting in the form of an excuse. But hey…

Eureka! No, that is not an exclamation (ignore the exclamation mark). It’s a TV show that two friends of mine have been trying to get me to watch for ages. And Cross is in three episodes. Gonna have to watch it next. And Orphan Black too, though I cannot remember seeing him. Will have to rewatch that episode.

So yes, here is my little tribute to an actor whose work I am enjoying.

Now I really need to get back to working on my novel.

Cheers all 🙂

Greg

 

PS: the copyright of the picture I used in my header belongs to SyFy and can be found at: http://www.syfy.com/darkmatter/blog/dark-matter-three-things-you-should-know

 

 

 

5 Comments


  1. Here in Wales, ‘daggy’ would relate to the output of sheep. This was interesting as I’ve not viewed either of the series mentioned.


    1. I think that that is the etymological background in Australia and “dag” came to mean someone who (in a fond sense) is socially awkward with suggestions of also being a bit plain, dowdy, silly and so on. We then turned ut into an adjective “daggy”. The shows are American. Australia is lucky in that we get inundated with shows from both the US and UK.


      1. There’s quite a lot of references in American shows that I don’t understand, especially comedies but I don’t watch a lot of television.


        1. I think that good science fiction speaks in broad terms, and I think that the US does produce some great science fiction. This said, I admit I prefer UK comedy.

          In respect to watching television, I guess that I like it for its stories. An author whose name escapes me said that their wife encouraged them to watch soap operas and they were surprised by the insights into storytelling that they subsequently learned. 🙂


  2. I think I saw Lexa Doig on Eureka in those couple of episodes I caught once. And of course it’s what Colin Ferguson is supposed to be famous for, but I just know him as William from Haven because I root for the underdogs even in the world of TV.

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