Nick Kyme

You’d be forgiven, I think, for not recognising the name in the subject bar, but Lance Reddick is one of those TV genre-show actors that deserves some recognition in my book.

His list of film acting credits (at least according to Wikipedia) is modest but it’s in TV where Lance Reddick excels. He first came to my attention in Fringe as Agent Philip Broyles, masterclassing a combination of dour and cool that really made me sit up and take notice. But in actual fact, I’d seen him before in an earlier show, one that you might know the name of… He also plays Matthew Abaddon (such a cool character name) in Lost, exuding a faint air of menace and ‘ends justifying the means’ mentality.

Lately, I’ve been a student of The Wire (okay, so it’s taken me a little time to start watching and see what all the fuss was about, but I’ve finished season one and am into season two) and here Reddick looms large again as the supposedly career-obsessed Officer Cedric Daniels.

It seems whatever Reddick turns his hand to he  really makes it work. I can’t claim that any of his characters, leastways those mentioned above, are that different from each other. There’s a detached, almost cold air to his performances (with splashes of warmth, made more real due to his default persona) that really put me in mind of a character I’ve included in one of my novels.

What regular readers of the blog may know is that when coming up with a cast to populate the Salamander series of novels and short stories (which, day by day, is growing into something of an opus) I actually tried to put names to faces by imagining who the actors would be that would play them. That’s not to say I wanted to envisage ‘Salamander the Movie’ or anything like that, I just wanted to anchor my abstract idea of the characters (the main ones, anyway) by giving them faces. Lance Reddick has an extremely interesting and unusual face. It’s intense, as is his manner and he has one of those really characterful voices that’s instantly recognisable and really makes him stand out. This was a man I wanted as part of my cast of Space Marines.

Okay, so most people will know that Kratos in God of War formed a big part of the inspiration for Tsu’gan – who seems to be known in a lot of circles as the Salamanders’ ‘angry man’. Quite right, too – that’s exactly what he is. On my laptop I’ve actually got an entire folder with headshots of the various actors that I revisit whenever I’m writing something significant involving a particular character in it.

Lance Reddick is part of that folder. He, in fact, was one of the first characters I ‘got down’ as it were. He was actually the inspiration for Apothecary Fugis (who will return, folks, oh yes). Thin-faced, intimidating but with the capacity for warmth and compassion, it was a perfect fit for the character.

It is strange sometimes to think about where inspiration can come from. I can certainly say it’s helped me immeasurably in the conceptualisation of Salamander and all the stories within and surrounding it.