Fuck Yeah, Paul Gross!

*gross sobbing at this part tbh*

popkin16:

GEOFFREY NO

YES. GEOFFREY, YES. VERY MUCH YES.

Geoffrey: Okay. I’ve been thinking about the willow speech—

Ellen: Oh no…

Geoffrey: You describe Ophelia’s death—

Ellen: Geoff—

Geoffrey: —in great detail, why?

Ellen:(exasperatedly) Geoffrey, please, you’re driving me insane!

Geoffrey: Why do you describe it in such detail?

Ellen: A young girl falls in the river and drowns. (turns to look at him) That kind of thing tends to stick with you.

Geoffrey: Why didn’t you save her?

Ellen: I don’t know, I didn’t want to ruin my dress— please don’t make me talk about this now—

Geoffrey: Ellen, come on. (slaps the dressing table top with his hand)

Ellen: (sighs) She was better off dead, she was suffering.

Geoffrey: Okay. (rises from his seat and walks across the dressing room) Let’s take this a little bit further. What if Ophelia didn’t drown? What if she killed herself?

Ellen:(twists in her chair to look at him) I say she was mad, she was incapable of her own distress.

Geoffrey: You could be lying.

Ellen: Oh, Jesus Christ!

Geoffrey: Ophelia drowns and you stand by and watch it happen. Why? Because you do believe that she’d be better off dead. You already feel responsible for her madness, and now you feel responsible for her death, so in a final act of mercy… (he sits back down) you lie about it. You disguise her apparent suicide so the poor thing can be buried in consecrated ground.

Ellen: (stares at him) Geoffrey, that is a completely different approach to the speech. 

Geoffrey: Yeah. (stands up again) I think it might be a bit stronger than your, “I didn’t wanna ruin my dress” subtext. 

Ellen:(shouts angrily) You can’t do this to me! This is the last performance!

Geoffrey:(pauses by the dressing room door) Well, think of it as your last chance to get it right. 

Ellen:(waits for him to leave, then screams incoherently)

- Slings & Arrows 2x01 Season’s End

Can I just talk a minute about how much I love this scene? Okay, well, I love all of the scenes, but this is indicative of Geoffrey and Ellen’s relationship at this point: he knows Ellen is capable of more, of better. He pushes her, openly challenging her. He knows she’s better than the performance she’s been giving and she won’t respond to coddling, so he pokes and prods at her, demanding she justify her motivations, knowing that she will rise to it in turn - and she does, magnificently.   

Geoffrey: It all started here. Or, ended here, depending on whether you’re talking about my … breakdown, or my career.

(He takes a swig from the bottle and sets it down)

Geoffrey: All right. Laertes was here. Brian. Much thinner then, looking. Dashing. Gertrude, Barbara Connolly, was here, behind me. She had the flu, poor thing. Claudius was next to her, everyone else was safely upstage, and I was standing at the grave.

(He looks at Ellen)

Geoffrey: Your grave. Oh, the irony.

— 1x06, Playing The Swan

Oh, Geoffrey and Ellen. My favourite dysfunctional TV couple. :3

What I really loved about the writing for Slings & Arrows is about what was left unsaid, what was left for us to read between the lines or speculate on. We know why - through the course of the season - why Geoffrey lost his marbles; but what we don’t know is just how the sheer bitterness festered between the end of that night and this point in the here and now between them. My BFF and I have a theory that Oliver encouraged and enabled Ellen’s self-destructive and subsequent prolific sexual behaviour, and perhaps even relayed those details to Geoffrey in order to ‘prove’ she wasn’t worth his time. After all, she let a gay man have sex with her (and another theory on that: she was a proxy fuck for Geoffrey, since Oliver expressed interest in him but Geoffrey had no real inclination in that direction). Even Ellen doesn’t seem to have much of a reason for it beyond, “He was my director,” but there’s a lot more complex issues happening beyond that.

Oh, Tumblr, this moment. A really wonderful flashback scene from the first episode of Slings & Arrows, before everything went pear-shaped and Geoffrey lost his marbles.

The look of utter adoration on his face here as he proposes to Ellen makes me go all mushy - and it’s all the more heartbreaking in the context of knowing what befalls them later.