The Working File

How do you go from portraying (1) a part-demon, son of two vampires, abducted while an infant and raised in a hell dimension, to (2) a WASP son of a socially important Manhattan family who attended Deerfield Acadamy, and end up playing the same character?

I’ve been watching Mad Men from its beginning, and although I’m a moderate fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I never really watched more than a few scattered parts of a handful of Angel episodes.  So it wasn’t until a few months ago that I discovered that the actor who plays Pete Campbell in Mad Men, Vincent Kartheiser, also played Angel’s son Connor in the Angel series, and it wasn’t until last week that I actually watched a few episodes that featured him in Angel.

After I got over the shock of watching someone who looks like Pete Campbell acting tough and being effective in multiple fight scenes, it struck me how essentially similar the two characters are.

Both Connor and Pete Campbell and extremely immature young men, who are prone to pouting and feeling very sorry for themselves.  Both feel trapped by the circumstances of their birth and upbringing, and seem to think that the world owes them something as a result.  Both also repeatedly display a very real desire to do what is right, and to become the men they think they need to be, even though they invariably make the wrong choice when faced with a crisis of confidence, morality, or even simple strategy.

This isn’t necessarily Kartheiser’s fault.   The writers create the character, and there are limits to an actor’s ability to move that character out of a certain mold.  It might even be the case that the producers of Mad Men cast Kartheiser because they figured that his work in Angel would translate smoothly into the Pete Campbell character, while Kartheiser assumed that by taking such a seemingly different role in a very different series, he would be expanding his range.

It didn’t turn out that way.