So many of Robin Williams’s best parts were about battling darkness
So many of Robin Williams’s best parts were about battling darkness
Updated by Todd VanDerWerff on August 12, 2014, 10:30 a.m. ET @tvoti
Robin Williams at the January Television Critics Association press tour session for The Crazy Ones. CBS
So many of Robin Williams's greatest roles are about laughter covering up a deeper darkness. So many of his worst roles were, too. So many of his roles period.
At the height of his fame in the mid-90s, when Williams could essentially get any film made that he wanted to, he was choosing projects like Mrs. Doubtfire and Jumanji, movies ostensibly aimed at a family audience that nevertheless dealt with a deeper fear of abandonment, of being left alone in a place where no one would love you — or in some cases even could love you.
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Williams appeared at the January Television Critics' Association winter press tour, for a session with his fellow cast members to talk about how the show had evolved from a Robin Williams vehicle into a true ensemble comedy. In the midst of the discussion, Williams was asked if his relationship with Sarah Michelle Gellar, the actress playing his daughter, was at all similar to the one between Simon and his daughter, if he spent much of his time on set trying to get her to laugh, just like Simon tried to win his way back into his daughter's heart through humor.
Williams's response was delivered with his usual alacrity and breathless comic pacing. The transcript from the event is peppered with frequent references to audience laughter, but stripped of his delivery, there's something inside of it that speaks to an element central to many of his most famous roles: compensation, the need for laughter to keep something untamable at bay.
Williams said:
(Audience laughter.)
It's that whole thing of, like, just get that moment. And sometimes it works and other times, no.
(Audience laughter.)
It becomes very sad for a moment. The desperate comic boy comes out.
The "desperate comic boy" Williams talked about self-deprecatingly was at the center of everything he did. To make people laugh was, for just a second, to be loved, to be okay. But no one laughs all of the time. And when Williams wasn't playing that desperate figure, out for a laugh at all costs, he was playing a healer, someone hoping to mend things that had been broken and could not be put back together. Think, for instance, of Patch Adams or Awakenings or The Fisher King, all films where he, a man on the verge of despair, is briefly able to see past himself to someone else in need of help.
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