#Robert Borden | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

heartlandians · 10 months

Text

Amber Marshall on Her ‘Heartland’ Family, Overcoming Loss & Amy Finding Love Again

Viewers of the beloved drama Heartland have grown up with Amber Marshall. The actress, 35, has portrayed Amy Fleming for more than 15 years, over 250 episodes and counting with season 17 now in production. The series, based on the bestselling books, follows the Bartlett-Fleming family and is set in the picturesque backdrop along the rolling foothills of the Rockies in the fictional town of Hudson, Alberta.

Amy enjoys the ranch life surrounded by horses she has cared for and open space. Though the rural setting has been anything but easy living. Much like Amy, Marshall and the rest of the cast have dealt with their own share of loss. One of the show’s stars, Robert Cormier, who played her love interest in Finn Cotter, died last September after a fall.

Despite being the longest-running television drama in Canadian TV history, the show continues to build on its existing audience beyond the Great White North. Among the Top 5 Most Streamed Shows in the U.S., the series recently premiered season 16 stateside exclusively on UP Faith & Family. Marshall took a break from filming season 17 to reflect on Heartland’s longevity and generational connection, as well as tease what’s to come.

What’s the vibe on set for season 17?

Amber Marshall: We really have become quite the family because we have been together for so many years. I think back to that whole idea when you are in high school and your peers become your family. That has happened on set over the years. The funny connection between it is we are actually playing a family on TV. We genuinely care about each other. I just absolutely love the longevity of the show because it makes the character have so much more realism and history with other characters.

How do you look at Amy’s evolution?

It’s a rare opportunity that an actor gets to play a character for this long. To be able to grow as a person simultaneously with my character’s growth has been cool. It’s interesting to see how the writers look at what is going on in my own life and then will mirror a lot of the stories because I’m going through a lot of the same things at the same time as my character is. I remember when our showrunner at the time Heather Conkie was at my own personal wedding taking notes. I said, “Oh, we’re bound to see this on the screen in a year or so.” Sure enough, very similar stories took place. That’s also the best way I can prepare for my role because I am going through these things in my own life. When it comes on screen I can say, “Wow, I’ve been there and experienced this. I know exactly how I handled it emotionally and can bring that into my character.

Amy’s daughter Lyndy (played by Ruby and Emmanuella Spencer) is really starting to come into her own this season. You’re definitely seeing a lot of the traits and horse-whisperer abilities in her as Mom.

There are two twin girls who play the role of Lyndy, and they were cast on the show when they were six months old. They have literally grown up on the show, and now they are going to be seven this summer. I really do feel they are my family. I’ve spent so much time with these girls. I’ve watched every stage they’ve had and watched them learn and develop. That to me has been really rewarding. Not just as an actor, but as a mother figure to these kids. I think again that brings so much realism into the show. They bring such realism to the show.

The show was dealt a devastating blow with Robert’s passing. Your character was so intertwined with his character Finn as seen in season 16. Fans wanted to see these two end up together long-term. You talk about being family on set. How has it been moving forward?

To add to all of that, fans were so excited to see Amy start to fall in love again. To live those moments onscreen and have such a connection with Robert and his character Finn. We spent multiple days having all kinds of different story arc talks. We thought, “Okay, this is going to take us through the rest of the season and beyond.” He and I would talk about it all the time. He was such a great guy and so open and very honest to work with. The conversations were easy. It is so fun to be around him.

When we found out the news, it was devastating. It was one of those moments that served as a reminder that you never know when you’re going to lose someone around you. We all took a step back and used it as a moment to look at our lives and who we love and care about and make sure they know that. You never know. There is no certainty in life. That was kind of an eye-opener for everyone on set. In a way, I do believe it did bring us all closer together because you can’t take anything for granted.

Season 16 is currently airing here in the U.S. via Up Faith & Family. What do you like most about Amy’s journey?

I believe that season 16 allowed Amy the opportunity to move forward with her life. After the death of her husband Ty [Borden] (Graham Wardle), there were a few seasons we wanted to spend honoring his legacy and their relationship and connection. Fans who have been long-time viewers of the show know how strong that connection was and how important the relationship was for the Heartland series. I think it’s respectful to the characters and the fans to show the grieving process and go through the stories of now a single mom who had to put her daughter before everyone else. But in a way those times were really taxing because for myself playing a grieving widow was hard on me. Every day you’re coming in upset and trying to get into very dark places. Season 16 was finally where it became, no, Amy is allowed to move forward. She is allowed to be happy. She was given that time for her to grieve and for fans to grieve with her. Now it’s about her moving forward and opening up her heart again

There are theories that Sam [Langstone] (Shawn Roberts) is the new love interest. What can you tease about the future for him and Amy?

I think it’s always important when you have a female character who has been through love and loss to have characters that are always kind of there. When there is always that potential of asking, “Is there going to be something that happens?” You never know. That’s what keeps stories interesting when you don’t know the exact path the character is going to take. Sometimes there are certain things, even our own lives that we are just neighbors or friends or whatever we might see them as. Then a life situation might turn the corner where might actually view them differently. One of my friends. She is a widow and lost her husband. She always joked about her neighbor. Four years later she ended up married her neighbor. You never know what is going to happen.

How much longer do you see yourself playing Amy?

I love this character. Not even the character, but this lifestyle. Heartland has one of the nicest environments that I have been in when it comes to a film set. We primarily film outdoors in beautiful locations. Every day I show up to work it’s breathtaking. Yes, there are bad days when it’s snowing and minus 30 and we have to forget about that. Today it’s a hot, beautiful summer day, and we get to hang out with a great group of people and a bunch of horses all day. We’re at the ranch today. I don’t know if I could ever find a better job than this. It fits my life so perfectly. I live in Alberta. I love Alberta. I don’t want to be anywhere else. I will ride this horse as long as it’s here.

What do you attribute the show’s success and longevity to?

I think fans are really looking for a nice, wholesome, family show that they can sit down together and watch and not be worried about the content. Not have to explain things to their kids. That’s one of the biggest things I hear as far as feedback that people. That Heartland has actually brought their family closer together. The more I hear about it and hear kids will watch the show and call their grandparents to talk about it. That is their common thread. It’s something we can all enjoy and sit and talk about. In such a fast-paced world, where so many people are separated by devices and technology. Everybody is very disconnected, but they can still get together to sit and watch our show together.

Heartland, Season 16 is now streaming exclusively on UP Faith & Family

Source

#heartland #amber marshall #interview #season 16 #season 17 #tv insider #robert cormier #sam langston #lyndy borden #lyndy twins #UP FF

19 notes · View notes

denimbex1986 · 9 months

Text

'AFTER THE UNITED STATES COMPLETED its first successful test of an atomic weapon on July 16, 1945, enabling, less than a month later, the expeditious slaughter of an estimated one hundred forty thousand Japanese people in Hiroshima and seventy thousand in Nagasaki, most of them civilians, recollections of those present at the test site on a remote desert plain in New Mexico suggest that Robert Oppenheimer, the charismatic director of the secret laboratory responsible for designing the bomb, may have been at a loss for words. “It worked,” is all Oppenheimer’s brother Frank remembers the theoretical physicist mustered in the moments after the culmination of a four-years-long, $2.2 billion campaign involving the labor of some one hundred thirty thousand people to construct a weapon capable of killing just as many.

Later, in a 1948 cover story for Time magazine, Oppenheimer had the chance to insert something a bit more literary into the historical record, telling his interviewer that a line from the Bhagavad Gita flashed through his consciousness at the moment of the blast: “Now I am become death, the shatterer of worlds,” which he amended in a 1965 NBC television documentary, relying on his own translation of the Sanskrit text, to “destroyer of worlds,” which has a more apocalyptic ring to it.

In Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, our hero-physicist, played by Cillian Murphy, first utters the line while he’s balls-deep in a troubled communist named Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh). It’s one of several instances of speculation, if not outright historical infidelity, in Nolan’s transfiguration of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin into an operatic tragedy-cum-thriller for the big screen. This is a summer blockbuster, after all, and if we’re going to have three hours of chalkboard equations and security clearance hearings, we’re going to need to see the father of the atomic bomb fuck.

To tell the story of “the most important person who ever lived,” Nolan, who must have fancied himself uniquely qualified for the job, concocts an elaborate structure, switching between a “subjective” color and an “objective” black and white as he pinballs across three decades of the twentieth century, introducing us along the way to a cast of physicists, communists, communist physicists, presidents, professors, bureaucrats, spies, lovers, generals, colonels, congressmen, and war planners, all of it framed by the 1954 security clearance hearing that resulted in Oppenheimer’s expulsion from the establishment on spurious charges, and the 1959 congressional confirmation hearing of the film’s villain, Lewis Strauss, played by a Robert Downey Jr. (clearly thrilled to have been cut loose from the Marvel Cinematic Universe), who orchestrated the campaign against Oppenheimer five years earlier, in part because Oppenheimer embarrassed him one time before Congress but also because Strauss had a propensity to conclude that anyone who repeatedly disagreed with him, as Oppenheimer did, was a traitor. It’s a lot.

Somehow it works, sustaining tension through what is, increasingly, a rarity: a movie that’s mostly people talking in rooms. But as the laws of physics and Hollywood require, the complexity of plot is met with an equal and opposite force: thematic simplicity. This is a tragedy, we are repeatedly told, that turns on a Great Man’s blindness, to the exclusion of much else. “How could a man who saw so much be so blind?” Strauss asks early on to drive home the point.

Our blue-eyed sad boy emerges into the atomic age, repentant, bent on preventing the annihilation of the human race.

To get at the answer, there’s a lot of ground to cover. And so, at a frenetic clip, we follow Oppenheimer through his school days at Cambridge (where he leaves a poisoned apple on the desk of his tutor, a worn-out bit of symbolism Nolan, thankfully, does little with) and later at the University of Göttingen (where a montage of Oppenheimer staring intently at a Picasso painting, reading T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” and dropping the needle on Stravinsky helpfully telegraphs to the unconvinced that we’re dealing with a sensitive genius) before he’s appointed, at the age of twenty-five, to an assistant professor of physics post at Berkeley, a campus awash in gin and radicals. There, he meets and falls in love with Tatlock, who tries to dye his wool red but settles for pink while alternating between accepting and spurning his advances. Soon he meets Katherine “Kitty” Puening, a thrice-married booze hound and former communist played with wild-eyed mettle by Emily Blunt, with whom he has a child and marries but not before Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch split the atom offstage in Berlin, proving the feasibility of the atomic bomb, which becomes a real cause for concern when Hitler invades Poland the following year. Oppenheimer gets pulled into the top-secret Manhattan Project by General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon, less of a distended thumb than the real man but still well-played), who installs him as the director of what would become the Los Alamos laboratory over the protestations of numerous pinko-fearing officials.

By the late spring of 1945, Oppenheimer and a small town’s worth of physicists are nearing completion of their little “gadget,” which the United States, having missed the chance to nuke the Nazis, plans to use against Japan—but also to, as the real Groves put it as early as 1944, “subdue the Russians.” The Japanese government was grasping about for acceptable terms of surrender, which select portions of the U.S. military apparatus knew but ignored and later downplayed in favor of framing the matter as a choice between launching a protracted land invasion that would have cost hundreds of thousands of American lives and dropping two weapons of mass destruction. Nolan doesn’t wade too far into the nitty-gritty here, though we do get to watch the meeting in which Secretary of War Henry Stimson graciously strikes Kyoto off the list of possible targets because he had a great time there on his honeymoon.

To the consternation of those who perceive representation to be the chief measure of a film’s merit, Nolan pointedly declines to depict the actual bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; instead, we watch as Oppenheimer becomes so overwhelmed with guilt while giving a speech to a violently enthusiastic crowd at Los Alamos that he hallucinates stepping on the incinerated corpse of a Japanese civilian. (Nolan apparently penned the screenplay in the first-person, presumably because he feels a degree of affinity with his protagonist.)

And thus our blue-eyed sad boy emerges into the atomic age, repentant, bent on preventing the annihilation of the human race. The real Oppenheimer never publicly apologized for his role in the bombings, but in the immediate aftermath of the war, he did try—and fail—to make headway on the international regulation of atomic weapons while wringing his hands about how physicists had “known sin” and issuing warnings to the public about the dangers of a nuclear arms race. For the sake of time, Nolan emphasizes Oppenheimer’s role, as the chairman of the General Advisory Committee to the Atomic Energy Commission, in formally advising the government against pursuing a crash program to develop a “super,” or hydrogen, bomb in 1949. At the time, the H-bomb was thought to be technically unfeasible, but even if it could be developed it might by dint of its awesome destructive power become “a weapon of genocide.” It seemed to make more sense to put American resources toward building conventional nuclear weapons, perhaps “tactical” nuclear weapons for use on the battlefield, as the real Oppenheimer advocated less than a year into the Korean War. This was a strategic pivot from his 1946 stance that nuclear bombs of any size were “a supreme expression of the concept of total war,” though perhaps not as extreme as his consideration of “preventive war” against the Soviet Union in 1952, an idea he had scorned a mere three years earlier. The evolution, which is to say general tack to the right, of Oppenheimer’s thinking didn’t much matter to those in power, who could not forgive him for declining to offer a full-throated endorsement of developing bombs hundreds of times more powerful than the ones dropped on Japan. In their view, this was evidence of communist sympathy, perhaps treason.

Oppenheimer’s contradictions and occasionally elastic thinking are downplayed; Nolan needs to keep his protagonist’s postwar moral compass obdurately fixed for dramatic import as we near the final showdown: the 1954 security clearance hearing, covertly orchestrated by Strauss, then chairman of the AEC, in the wake of a list of charges against Oppenheimer claiming that, in addition to obstructing the development of the hydrogen bomb, the erstwhile fellow traveler was “more probably than not . . . an agent of the Soviet Union,” as William L. Borden, the staff director for the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, put it after poring over Oppenheimer’s FBI file, by then over seven thousand pages long. Oppenheimer’s numerous enemies wished to, as Edward Teller put it, see him “defrock[ed] in his own church,” and this was their chance. The hearing, convened in an anonymous D.C. conference room in April and calling numerous prominent physicists and officials as witnesses, would thus determine if a man prone to dissent ought to have his top-secret “Q” clearance renewed, even though Oppenheimer was, by that time, only acting as an occasional consultant to the GAC he once chaired. At the height of McCarthyism, dissent had become confused with disloyalty, and Oppenheimer would, after spending some twenty-seven hours in the witness chair, become its most prominent victim.

For a film to play in thirty-six thousand theaters opening weekend in this country, it needs more than Florence Pugh’s tits.

Oppenheimer was assured the transcript of the proceeding would never be made public, but Strauss (who got his comeuppance five years later when Congress declined to confirm his appointment to Eisenhower’s cabinet) saw to it that the government printing office published it promptly, all three thousand typewritten pages of it. The media was quick to recognize that the father of the atomic bomb had been martyred in an “Aristotelian drama,” “Shakespearean in richness and variety,” with “Eric Ambler allusions to espionage,” a “plot more intricate than Gone With the Wind” with “half again as many characters as War and Peace,” much of which could also be said of Nolan’s film, which finds screen time for former Nickelodeon stars and also Rami Malek, who cannot act.

Nolan, too, recognizes the Shakespearean qualities of the hearing and quotes liberally from the best parts, already helpfully curated in American Prometheus. Though, again, we are not shown the points where Oppenheimer declines to adopt, unequivocally, the “moral” position Nolan wishes to ascribe to him—in fact, he preferred to “leave the word ‘moral’ out of” the discussion of the hydrogen bomb, though he nevertheless “had qualms about [it].” The hydrogen bomb was a “dreadful weapon,” but it was also “from a technical point of view . . . a sweet and lovely and beautiful job.” As for the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima, he “set forth arguments against dropping it,” but “did not endorse them.” Which is not to say that Oppenheimer was a moral relativist, adopting and abandoning positions exclusively for the sake of personal advantage. He wasn’t and he didn’t, though he was certainly more complex, more frustratingly human, than his IMAX representation.

Don’t get me wrong; Oppenheimer is a superb achievement and will be appropriately showered with astronomical box office returns, critical praise, and awards (Oscars most likely for both Murphy and Downey Jr.), but despite Nolan’s nerdishly painstaking attention to detail (we learn, for instance, Oppenheimer sometimes dipped his martini glasses in lime juice and honey), he shows little interest in offering up anything that might complicate the audience’s notion of Oppenheimer as a Great Man of History guided by idealism, blinded by naivete, and doomed by his temerity to stand astride the arms race, yelling stop.

I’ve long thought the tragedy of Oppenheimer’s life would best be suited to the stage, and I’m not the first: in 1964, three years before Oppenheimer died of throat cancer, the German playwright and psychiatrist Heinar Kipphardt, blustering about Hegel’s advice to lay bare the “core and significance” of historical events by freeing them from “adventitious contingencies and irrelevant accessories,” adapted the 1954 hearing into a tediously didactic two-act play. At the start of each scene, various themes and guiding questions are projected onto a scrim: “IS THERE SUCH A THING AS HUNDRED-PER-CENT SECURITY?” “LOYALTY TO A GOVERNMENT. LOYALTY TO MANKIND.” At the end, characters approach the footlights to browbeat the audience with a pedantic soliloquy, including Roger Robb, the hearing’s prosecutor, who wonders, “Do we dissect the smile of a sphinx with butchers’ knives? When the security of the free world depends on it, we must.”

The worst comes from the Oppenheimer character himself, who, after being served the verdict that spelled the end of his formal access to the beltway barbarians, steps forward to bemoan that, “We have been doing the work of the Devil, and now we must return to our real tasks.” The real Oppenheimer—who later clarified that when he claimed physicists had “known sin,” he actually meant the sin of pride—never went this far. So it’s no surprise he hated the concluding monologue and the play’s general allergy to ambiguity so much that he threatened legal action against its author, though he eventually agreed to sit through a production in France, which he liked a bit because it relied more heavily on the official transcripts, though he still felt Kipphardt had “turned the whole damn farce into a tragedy.”

There can be few direct comparisons between a spartan stage play penned by a psychiatrist incapable of originality and a $100 million thriller written by an accomplished egomaniac, but they do share something in how they approach their protagonist, sanding off his ambiguities and contradictions so as to present a tragic figure haunted by what he’s wrought. Perhaps Nolan can’t be entirely blamed: for a film to play in thirty-six thousand theaters opening weekend in this country, it needs more than Florence Pugh’s tits; it must be obvious, possessed of a storybook sense of morality, expurgated of any evidence that J. Robert Oppenheimer was, though certainly distressed by the implications of nuclear weapons, not above pragmatic concessions he thought might help him retain the beltway power and influence he won after snatching fire from the gods and handing it to man.

His was a strategic error not uncommon to well-intentioned Washington insiders: the naive belief that, through a careful balancing act of dissent, strategic ambivalence, and acquiescence, one can use power to enact more positive change from within than without—a form of blindness, surely. Oppenheimer was a man who appeared to want it both ways: to play the part of the somber public intellectual as well as the consummate insider. That was his undoing, the true crux of the man’s tragedy. There is not much room for such everyday failings here, even in 70mm.'

4 notes · View notes