Deadwood breaks out with same-sex storylines in season three
Will & Grace has wrapped, Sex and the City is in syndication and The L-Word just doesn't earn the ratings. Vito just got clipped on The Sopranos. So, where's a viewer to turn to see celebrities acting out same-sex storylines?
As it launches its third and final season (HBO, June 11), Deadwood, the expletive-drenched series about an 1870s gold-mining town, steps up and examines issues of sexuality. Prostitutes have been a fixture of the South Dakota camp and there was even a sadistic necrophiliac in a few episodes (he was eventually murdered). But everyday heterosexual and homosexual relationships got short shrift. That's about to change.
Don't expect Al Swearengen (Ian McShane) or Timothy Olyphant (Seth Bullock) to go Brokeback anytime soon. Instead it's a peripheral character, Calamity Jane, played by actor Robin Weigert, who falls in love with a recurring female character. She's "spent much of the last two years drunk [so] it's about time for her [Jane] to evolve," laughs Weigert.
"Women were like slaves then and my challenge was to build a character that is already beaten down." Weigert's Calamity Jane is both ugly and damaged. "I have to put my vanity somewhere else," she says.
Playing a character that is unattractive and dirty all the time has been tough for Weigert. She sometimes thinks, "What if I'm ugly forever?" She accepted a part as a stripper in the upcoming, The Good German, opposite George Clooney, for which she donned a platinum blonde wig and mastered fan dances. "He was flirting with me and I thought, 'I'm sexy!' You know, I only had 10 days on the film but I felt like 'I'm a woman'." Flirting with George Clooney was a terrific foil to the role she embodies on Deadwood.
David Milch, executive producer adds, "Calamity Jane is a prime example of someone who really had to give up her sense of gender in order to live. What Jane has done is persuade herself that she is the worst person in the world. It was a way of retaining hope that things could change."
Another storyline this season centres on Brian Cox (Troy) as newcomer Jack Langrishe, a flamboyantly gay theater owner who brings his troupe to Deadwood. "He is a major element this season," Milch added.
