Jonny Lee Miller: a Sherlock teamed with a woman


Jonny Lee Miller, formerly Edmund Bertram & Mr Knightley, now Sherlock Holmes

Dear friends and readers,

I find it telling that the role of the latest Sherlock, the icon figure now to be re-characterized to fit with a woman parnter, Joan Watson (Lucy Liu) has gone to Jonny Lee Miller. He often plays sexually ambiguous and distraught men when he’s in modern dramas (Prime Suspect; for example, Trainspotting before that), and (tellingly) he was both Edmund Bertram in Patricia Rozema’s 1999 iconoclastic Mansfield Park, and Mr Knightley in Sandy Welch’s newly thought-out Emma 2009. These are both morally upright men who cling to and teach the young women they have fallen in love with.

The vulnerable Edmund:


It is Fanny who takes him into her kisses

Mr Knightley walking around his property: the male loner who has the bad dreams (not Emma) in this film adaptation:

Who is cast in a part is centrally important to the conception of a film. Just before watching this year’s Woody Allen film, To Rome with Love, I saw Miller doing an interview about the new Sherlock. He is a genuinely intelligent actor (who also provided some insight in an interview on his part in Welch’s film).

A really touching video of him in The Pardoner’s Tale:

The news has made me want to try the new Sherlock as I found the Benedick Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman series genuinely worth watching.

Ellen

Author: ellenandjim

Ellen Moody holds a Ph.D in British Literature and taught in American senior colleges for more than 40 years. Since 2013 she has been teaching older retired people at two Oscher Institutes of Lifelong Learning, one attached to American University (Washington, DC) and other to George Mason University (in Fairfax, Va). She is also a literary scholar with specialties in 18th century literature, translation, early modern and women's studies, film, nineteenth and 20th century literature and of course Trollope. For Trollope she wrote a book on her experiences of reading Trollope on the Internet with others, some more academic style essays, two on film adaptations, the most recent on Trollope's depiction of settler colonialism: "On Inventing a New Country." Here is her website: http://www.jimandellen.org/ellen/ No part of this blog may be reproduced without express permission from the author/blog owner. Linking, on the other hand, is highly encouraged!

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