Succession's Macfadyen and The Staircase's Firth were "once most recognized as the perfect embodiments of the glowering heartthrob in Pride & Prejudice, but thanks to HBO, those fuzzy memories are dead," says Jodi Walker. "There is a thin line between love and hate," Walker adds. "There is also, it seems, a thin line between a beloved romantic lead with a sullen heart of gold and a chemise-dropping glower and a despised, often immoral, pompous, maybe-criminal antihero. The former is a well-trodden trope of the romance genre, while the latter exists exclusively on HBO, a network whose casting department insists on taking our most revered Mr. Darcies—our most sopping-wet Regency-era leading men, our greatest bewitchers of body and soul—and turning them into inscrutable villains."
TOPICS: Matthew Macfadyen, HBO, HBO Max, The Staircase (2022), Succession, Colin Firth