For those of you not in the following, a tweeter and contributor for EW entertainment, @DanaSchwartzzz, was rude about Richard Armitage and his role in Ocean’s 8. There was a lot of back and forth among and between fans and Schwartz over the weekend. She referred to him as a no name, and a few other unkind descriptions as she responded to hurt and angry fans, and then began to diss fans and the fandom. She backed off a little.
My preference would have been for him to ignore it publicly, rather than apologize. He did what he could with the role, the lack of screen time with his opposite, Sandra Bullock and the failure of the writers to better define their past relationship in the plot. He can play anything, anyway, as we know, so I imagine the director wanted a mealy sort of character.
So, I think he’s wrong. I don’t see that Damien Lewis is an A-lister, with some good television credits, but no real film credits. I guess with the success of Homeland and Billions, he might have been of a household word currently, but check out his credits and see what you think. He’s done a lot of TV.
If there’s a response from her, let me know. She blocked me, although I never directly challenged her.
Armitage Agonistes 
She didn’t block me, and I responded to her directly. But she is stupid, and he should not have replied.
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Well, I might have hit her where it hurts at about 2:30 a.m. or so, while I was trying to get my First Take up and got distracted when I noticed this. I, too , wish he hadn’t replied and I didn’t like his reply. There were so many other ways she could have expressed her view that casting for this part should have matched the main 8 to be consistent with the franchise, if she thought that was necessary – and then she dug in, although later backtracked. Then, as you saw, she starting dissing fans (Stans?) OTOH, halfway through the film, one of my friends asked me when he was coming on and the other didn’t know who he was, but said she watched Berlin Station.
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The thing is no alert fan thinks he’s an A-list actor. I think in her world there are only A-list actors and everyone is fair game for snark. That might have been true 30 years ago, but the Internet has created a lot of Internet niches. I mean: for me, the star of a Bollywood film might be totally unknown, but he’s a household name in India.
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Oh totally no fan thinks he’s an A-list. It’s one of the fandom’s big disappointments. It’s the motivation for my own blog. Also, I really her question her taste about Chris Pine for that role, not that it matters.
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For one thing, Pine is 15 years younger than Bullock. Which raises a ton of questions for me about why he’d be seen as more convincing in the role.
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She responded to him with an apology. A big slice of humble pie, although I can’t say that that really does the trick. Too little too late.
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Cultural factors may be at work in reading here, but that was not quite an apology. It was “I’ll pay you on the head and hope this goes away.”
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Agree it was a non-apology. Also, she was liking snarky comments of her supporters at around the same time she was apologizing to RA.
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Ohhhh. Interesting. Shall I say again, I’, out of the loop since she blocked me. So keep me posted.
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It wasn’t an apology for what she tweeted. It was more an apology for how things turned out, which weren’t good for her either. Ultimately, there were a number of insulting tweets – so which was hyperbole and which weren’t? What cultural differences.
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True. Maybe not an apology but an acknowledgement. Only damage control.
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Damage Control! That’s exactly it.
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Agree. I just saw the reply. I hate that he tweeted what he did.
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I wish he ignored her, too, but at the same time his response was so gracious that I’m also glad he did.
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Yeah – I’m on the fence. Maybe because his reply means he saw the nastiness about him and it seems to have a hurt for a while, and that hurts me. So, had he never replied, I wouldn’t have known that it bothered him. Does that make sense? Also, I want to shake him if he really thinks Damien Lewis is an A-List actor.
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It makes sense. I sometimes wonder what he thinks of the things written about him on Twitter even if I prefer that he ignore them. I do think the writer’s comments and those of her posse stung a lot. And the horoscope tweet. I felt his vulnerability reading the post and it honestly made me sad.
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Same here. We like him – so when he hurts ( or we think he does) then we hurt with him and for him.
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Not all of us.
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Fair enough, and if so, maybe not every instance.
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It’s in character, though. I wonder how much of it may have actually been aimed at appeasing the fans rather than her?
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IIDK if I’d say appeasing, because what he said, a lot of fans don’t agree with – but I do think he wanted to stop the discussion, including the fans’ responses to her. And, he couldn’t delete.
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Stopping the discussion- yes.
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Do you think Damien Lewis is A List? Nobody has responded to my opinion that he isn’t. He’s a Tv guy, and some stage, mainly.
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Hm, hard to say. He may be TV A list, but has he been in any films??? I would define A list actors as such who are household names, i.e. even people who are not big into celebrities or the entertainment industry would know the name… and that neither applies to DL nor to RA
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I agree. So we disagree with RA that they had an A List actor who had to back out and they got RA instead.
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I don’t recall Damien Lewis having a lead role in the millions-earning Hobbit franchise….
Also, it seems that the O8 ladies loved his “forgettable, no-name” replacement.
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Right – taking nothing away from Damien Lewis as an actor ( except that as a matter of personal taste I find him physically unattractive – almost repulsive), he is not an A-list actor either by the standards most people use – which I guess is big Hollywood box office drawers and name recognition.
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Nope, not an A-lister. I think RA was being his generous, fanboyish self when he called DL that.
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I don’t know who he is other than being the guy Richard Armitage replaced. I’m not being snarky, I have no idea who he is.
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You’re not alone. Which is why I found it odd ( and disappointing) that Armitage tweeted that he did about his predecessor. Armitage must know Damien Lewis is at a closer or lower “rank” to himself. What Lewis has going for him, are back to back starring roles in popular ( but not as popular as Lincoln’s) and smart cable TV show: Homeland ( season 1 and 2) and Billions.
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I think that’s right b/c it’s only fans who care. Schwartz doesn’t. The other cultural factor at work here, potentially, is the way that an English person will cut you and then laugh at you for not realizing you’ve been cut. (sorry Brits but it’s a cultural style thing.) So he may be laughing about it, without half the world realizing that she’s been insulted. (including her)
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Oh, she was totally put into her place by him, I agree. But in that typical Brit way that seems rather demure on first sight. Slow burner.
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I’m having trouble understanding this cultural thing at play you and Serv are discussing. Can you spell it out for me?
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We talked about it on one of my threads. It relies on how Brits understand restraint and embarrassment and what a non-Brit picks up about it. First, rather than making an obvious score on someone who’s being rude, one pulls back and makes a joke (this is what Armitage did yesterday). This might be read as kind or humble or charming or polite. But from the viewpoint of the person responding, the politeness is also readable as irony. (I think this was conveyed by the nerd-face emoji yesterday: i.e., Armitage said “but you do have a point … nerd-face emjoi”). By claiming that he’s a nerd, he’s actually pointing out that he’s not a nerd at all, and she’s an idiot.
So far, so good, but from the British perspective, he would get additional points if she didn’t understand how badly she’d been cut. So one of the goals in an interaction like that is to be really mean to the person in such a way that they don’t understand how badly they’ve been treated but everyone else around them does — so in essence everyone else is laughing, just not the person who was targeted.
You could compare it to (say) walking around with toilet paper attached to your shoe and not knowing about it. Overstating the difference wildly here — the US perspective would think that it was just embarrassing to be walking around that way and so if you wanted to embarrass the person even worse, you’d make a point of alerting them and directly making fun of them to their face, so they knew how ridiculous they looked. From the UK perspective, however, it would be more embarrassing if no one told you about the toilet paper everyone just whispered about it while you were oblivious.
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Very complicated, but I get it now and I’ll look for it in the future. One loses the immediate satisfaction of your target knowing she’s been dissed -so that does take restraint. So, do you think Schwartz got that?
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You know what? Bless her little heart.
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OK, excellent. “Bless your heart” is the *perfect* (albeit rare) example of this kind of thing. It’s a way to be catty while appearing to have been polite. And if you’re an outsider to the culture that uses the expression, you have no idea what has just happened to you.
Schwartz? No, I don’t think she got it.
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I newd my laptop for that (currently thumbing on my phone – which only lends itself to short replies.)
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Dana WHO?
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I do think we know that Armitage isn’t an A-lister, and maybe he actually likes it better that way since he can walk around New York unrecognized and yet never has a shortage of work. I had never heard of Damien Lewis. And when I was mentioning the whole thing to my 16-year-old, he said “Who?” about both Lewis and Chris Pine. (Chris Pine would not be my choice for sure.)
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I guess you’ve looked it up by now – if not – Damien Lewis is a Brit who starred in the first two seasons of the wildly popular Homeland (before it got weirder) and now in Billions – both US cable shows with lots of nominations. He was also in the remake of The Forsythe Saga and played Henry VIII in Wolf Hall and other stuff – but mostly all TV and some stage. No or few movies. I can never remember his last name. I am surprised that your 16 year old doesn’t know Chris Pine – I know him from Captain Kirk in Star Trek movies and he was male lead in Wonder Woman – and I guess a few other things. He suffers from being one too many actors named Chris at the moment ( see my post with You Tube video where even he knows people, well, essentially don’t know his face.) He could almost be Sandra Bullock’s son.
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Wolf Hall — yeah, I saw that. OK, that at least give me a face.
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Damian Lewis did a lot of work in the US (Band of Brothers, Life, Homeland, Billions) and may be a bit more known there than RA.
And although he is a well-known actor in the UK too (Wolf Hall, Stage Work, married to Helen McCrory) I wouldn’t call him an A-Lister.
But it was nice of RA to suggest it, I guess….
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I think at the time Richard was being gracious to a fellow Brit/actor. That Dana Dimwit wouldn’t know irony if it hit her in the face. Totally unprofessional twat and he zinged her big time.
Why did she block you? And another comment about he couldn’t delete the tweet? Why not if he’s deleted other tweets?
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He couldn’t delete her tweets, and that’s what his fans were responding to. I don’t know why she blocked me. Read the blog maybe. I can’t recall now whether I tweeted something else she might have seen, but I never responded to her tweet. I considered her blocking me a badge of honor. I’ve also been blocked RA_US and Marlise Boland (The Anglophile Channel) – also badges of honor.
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