35 years after winning an Academy Award for “Ordinary People,” Timothy Hutton found creative heaven with writer and producer John Ridley (“12 Years A Slave”). ABC won’t be bringing Ridley’s anthology drama series “American Crime” back next year, but for three seasons it provided Hutton with the sort of rich, complex characters any actor would dream of playing. Hutton took the ball Ridley rolled out and ran with it earning an Emmy nomination in 2015 and barely missing the cut last year. Now, he may say goodbye to the under appreciated series with a second Emmy nod in the Outstanding Lead Actor in a Limited Series or Movie category.
Hutton returned to “Crime” as Nicholas Coates, a North Carolina furniture manufacturer trying to save his company from bankruptcy while keeping the details from his wife and former business partner, Claire (Lili Taylor). Things aren’t any easier at home where Claire has hired a nanny, Gabrielle (Mickaëlle X. Bizet), from Haiti who speaks no English and, as time passes, seems to be the victim of physical abuse from someone in the Coates family. Nicholas is slowly seething throughout the series and its some of Hutton’s most nuanced work in some time.
I spoke to Hutton about his role and working with Ridley in conjunction for an interview with THR last month. Here is our complete conversation.
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How did shooting “American Crime” work? Since it’s a limited series does John Ridley let you know the arc of your character and where he’s going or is it something you discover as scripts come in during the season?
It’s been such a great experience working with him and hearing what the new character for the new season would be in the case of the second season. He called me up and said, “Here’s what we’re gonna do thematically and the part that you would play is this basketball couch, a private high school in Indiana” and give me the outline of the story and the outline of the character and then it would become a conversation and he would ask questions and I would ask questions, just sort of very organically leading this conversation about the possibilities of where the character could go, but when he asks you questions, “What do you think about the character?” Or “what kind of guy does he [seem to be] to you initially?” You answer that and then that’s it. A couple of months later, you’re reading the third script of the new season or whatever and one little detail that was discussed between myself and John emerges in the scene and he’s just so very specific and thorough and thoughtful about any conversation that we the actors have had with him. He remembers everything and thinks about every possibility and ever detail. That was the case in the second season. Of course the same thing happened going into the third season where I remember he called me up, I think it was last summer, and wanted to talk about what the season was gonna be and what the character was gonna be and we talked a lot about that. I asked some questions about, “Is this a new business, furniture business? Was it something that was passed down his father was part of the couch furniture business, grandfather et cetera, how much pride does he have?” All these questions I had and it just came up as a confrontation and then he asked me questions about my thoughts about certain things and just a very creative process in discussing all of it. Then when we actually went in production, he said in the beginning to all of us, “You’ve got an open door for any thoughts or concerns or idea and to please come to me with them”.
How did you see Nicholas as a character before the series started?
[John] gave such a thorough, complete portrait over the phone of not just who Nicholas Coats was, but also the marriage, because the marriage itself is almost a character. There’s Lili [Taylor’s character], Nick as a character then there’s the marriage, is what the two of them make up. It was very toxic situation. He gave such a thorough portrait that I just had some questions that really came out of being inspired by what he had said. There was one thing that I remember came up in conversation that I just threw out there as a possible idea, because it sounded interesting to me when he talked about the tension between them and the fighting that was gonna happen between two characters, the toxic way in which they approach one another. I remember saying to him on the phone, it seems like there’s a potentially interesting possibility for a public argument that is either over dinner with two friends of theirs or maybe they belong to a bowling alley and they start discussing something, and it’s public and tensions spill over and they have an argument in front of other people, which is always so painful and uncomfortable when that happens. Maybe he said to me on the phone, “Uh huh. I see. Do you shoot pool?” I said, “Yeah, I play a little bit of pool” and he said, “O.K, O.K., well good to know”. Then we started talking about something else and then months later episode, I don’t know if it was six or seven, the pool table scene, it think it was six, but anyway, I read the script and there it is. Nick and Claire and two of their friends are out playing pool one evening and it starts to get very tense and argumentative between them. That was fun to see.
It seemed like the frustration in your character was growing little by little each episode. Where you trying to stagger that final reveal so that it was more of an arc than maybe a viewer might have initially noticed?
In any of the seasons none of us would see the scripts in advance. We would get the scripts maybe a week to ten days before starting a new episode. While we might know certain general ideas of the arc of a character, but there were a lot of surprises. John didn’t want us to know what all the mapping was. I would read the script one at a time and just prepare for that episode with a general knowledge of where it might be going, but certainly no specific details. When I was doing episode five, for example, I had no idea that in episode eight I’d be in a police station with my wife hearing her basically said, “Yeah, I did all these things and now you’re gonna have to take care of our kid because I’m going”. There isn’t any specific knowledge of real big turns that happen.
John is so great about encouraging us to ask for anything we need to do anything we need to know, rather, so that we can go about the process of measuring if you will where the character is episode to episode so that it doesn’t get too hot too soon or too cold too soon. It’s a tricky balance because he understands that dilemma for the actor, but he also wants to make sure that we don’t know everything so that some things will come as a organic surprised way in which we approach a scene. In the case of what I felt I had to do with the character, I just wanted to understand what led to the state of mind they both were in when they meet them. “How long has it been since they weren’t really getting along?” And, there were issues between them and “How much talking had they done prior to when we meet them? Who’s idea was it to adopt or not adopt?” There were a lot of discussions about it. “Was this something that Nicholas wanted or did he want them to just carry on as just the two of them running the business together without a child? These are the kind of things that both Lili and I were curious about, sort of their backstory, of course, and what led to the current state when we meet them. Then as it goes on, you just try to, you get clues.
When I would finish an episode and wonder where this is gonna go and I wonder how I should moderate or temper what a character is in terms of when he’s around Claire or how he feels about the kid or how he feels about the business. I start thinking about things and then I get the next script and all those questions that I had would be answered just in the writing. Lastly, I would say there was just a moment [in the finale] where I’m with our son at the courthouse and, if I remember right, there’s just a realization. The character has to kind of look at the kid or just in the smallest gestures hopefully let the kid know, “Hey, I’m gonna take care of you. Things are gonna be O.K.”
“American Crime” season three is currently available on ABC.com.
