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Martin, you’re such a shit. Please don’t ever change.
Every once in a while, though, his predilection for assholishness grates on me. The interviewer made a simple error, the first comment that they’re not both girls is fine. I know he’s protective of his kids but its not like anyone is asking names or where they go to school. Simple question, which he answers at the end perfectly fine – so why the decent into being such an ass in the middle? A simple “My kids aren’t my career, and I don’t talk about them in interviews” would have sufficed. It reeks of power play, of putting the interviewer in their place and not in a good way, and it makes me squicky.
I feel sorry for the journalist, but I’m not sorry Martin’s like that. Martin is pretty intimidating if you don’t get his humour or if you have the paranoia that everyone hates you and you get flustered by sudden sarcasm. I know I would be intimidated if I went and talked to Martin Freeman, who keeps such a strainght face while joking and swearing and looking like he’s raging inside. And it’s just the way he is, it’s just his sense of humour, which I find pretty awesome.
Martin’s said it in an interview: he doesn’t click with everybody and he doesn’t try to be friends with everybody. His sense of humour is very British and sarcastic and unique. Which is why I admire him alot.
I’m not on journalists’ side (though there aren’t any sides to take here, really), and Martin Freeman keeps his kids out of his job/interviews (for an extremely good reason) and that shows here. He’s making a very strong point about it. At the same time he’s being himself. I think, while he’s obviously ready to answer this kind of a question this is a pretty good way of fending off new questions about his kids, which can become invasive.
I’m rambling now, but my point is: Martin doesn’t have to include his kids in, or exclude his personality from his interviews. I admire that he doesn’t.
Martin is a very funny guy, but humour is different for everyone.
There’s a simpler answer for this: Martin is incredibly deadpan, and a lot of interviewers have no idea what to do with deadpan due to the wide spectrum of peoples’ personalities they deal with day-to-day. It shuts questions down very effectively without getting in their face or too awkward.
I imagine that’s why Martin utilizes it so often; the film industry is full of sucking up, pomp and circumstance, and putting on a happy face, especially on the interview circuit, and from what I understand that’s something he rather dislikes. It’s his own kind of effort to keep his public persona grounded.
And he’ll be putting extra effort into it for the foreseeable future as The Hobbit sets him up for almost certain superstardom.
YES YES. I’m so horrible at saying what I’m thinking, or what I mean without thinking it. You nailed it.
And I’m not at all excited for what this might mean for his family. I hope some part of the media has SOME sense and leaves his family alone.
It’s really hard to say. He isolderandin a committed relationship, so fascination with him as a sex symbol a-la Benedict is probably unlikely. So there’s that, at least. I’m actually a little surprised this question came up at all. Some actors/people in the public have lists of ‘no-go’ topics in interviews distributed by PR staff before things like this – I just imagined Martin had something like that in place already regarding his kids.
The Hobbit is indeed A Big Fucking Deal, but fortunately doesn’t establish him as a James Bond-like paragon of male sexuality, so media fascination will hopefully stick to just Martin-as-an-actor-in-a-niche-genre-film and leave it at that.
I figured this was going to blow up when I said it, but I feel oddly strongly about it. Here’s the thing:
I don’t want him to change himself to fit in, because I think celebs do sublimate their personalities a lot. But in some respects they have to, to protect themselves. And I absolutely respect his desire to protect his kids, as I’ve stated elsewhere on multiple occastions. But there’s a line when interacting with anyone, and that line isn’t being an asshole, and here he failed, big time. He’s trying to intimidate the interviewer and I think that’s crass; a simple “I don’t talk about my kids in interviews, have you got anything else?” would have served just fine. If they pushed, then end it and walk away. The question didn’t bother him that much, as he answered it, so why the attitude? It was funny maybe the first time he did it, but now it looks nasty.
The defense of “But its his HUMOR! You just don’t GET IT.” Well, maybe. But I do get how this response here makes me cringe, and that’s enough for my opinion on the matter. He may be awesome 99% of the time, but here, in this situation, I think he was a jerk.
I think it really depends on his tone of voice when he said it. I know a guy who swears and says things like this all the time, and with his tone of voice and body language, he makes it riotously funny. You don’t feel insulted at all; it’s clearly a joke. From Martin’s body language here—vague gaze, looking away rather than at the person, so it’s non-confrontational—I suspect that in the actual clip, you’d discover he’s doing the same thing. (Especially going by how entertained Richard Armitage looks.)
People on Tumblr love their gifs, but they’re not really great for making judgment calls on this sort of thing.