In Defense of O-T Fagbenle’s Wacky Voice on Presumed Innocent
It’s like Sir Hiss from Robin Hood trying to go incognito as a Chicago lawyer. This is praise!
For weeks now, I have been thinking about how O-T Fagbenle says the word issue in Presumed Innocent’s penultimate season-one episode “The Witness.” As prosecuting attorney Nico Della Guardia, Fagbenle is a delightfully wicked presence, all smug dandyism when navigating the case against Rusty Sabich for the murder of Carolyn Polhemus. And when he talks, whew. That accent is slippery, a melodic rollercoaster that puts the emphasis on random syllables, adds unanticipated inflection points, and ends sentences so abruptly that you’re left feeling like you just flew by your exit. Fagbenle is the series’s wildcard, giving a performance that is mannered and odd and divisive. And you can grasp all of its sublime texture in the way he slides around issue.
In “The Witness,” we finally see newly elected chief prosecutor Nico question a witness: Detective Rigo, who previously had been aligned with Rusty and who now must speak to his behavior when he was entrusted with Carolyn’s case, before he became the primary suspect in her murder. Fagbenle lets Nico’s voice drip with sarcasm and contempt as he mocks Rigo’s decision-making and digs into her ethical reaction to Rusty offering a felon early release in exchange for potential information about Carolyn’s death. With “Did you take issue with this attempted bribe? Did you take issue with this approach?”, Nico makes issue lively and mellifluous, even as he goes in for the kill.
The word is only two syllables, but Fagbenle elongates it. Miraculously, he simultaneously gives it a long s sound and a shushing hiss, as if Nico started out saying issue the British way and then changed it midway through to the American pronunciation. It’s like Sir Hiss from Robin Hood trying to go incognito Stateside, which isn’t that far off given that Fagbenle is an Englishman playing a Chicagoan. But the actor has played a Windy City resident before — President Barack Obama, actually, in the miniseries The First Lady — and absolutely nailed Obama’s unique cadence. As Nico, Fagbenle is doing something totally different, something weirder and more free-flowing, less connected to Chicago’s distinct accent and more born out of stagy arrogance and shifty cosmopolitanism. His issue being so divorced from any one specific linguistic origin isn’t a mistake, but a way to signal Nico’s cartoon-villain qualities. (The Ghostbusters EPA inspector obsessed with upholding bureaucracy was a vocal inspiration, Fagbenle says.) He’s a jerk, and Fagbenle is having a blast using his voice to communicate that.
Most of the series’s laugh-out-loud moments are thanks to Fagbenle, whose whole thing is often the only point of levity in this otherwise dark show, so reliant on gruesome flashbacks to Carolyn’s body in death. The legal thriller is a constrained genre, with so much of the action taking place in a courtroom and the narrative divided into binaries of prosecution/defense, innocent/guilty; there isn’t a lot of room for experimentation — unless you’re Fagbenle. While Jake Gyllenhaal keeps Rusty tightly wrapped in a tornado of resentment and self-pity and Peter Sarsgaard amps up the smarm he’s known for, Fagbenle’s Nico is free to ping-pong around in his affect. He sing-songs “It’s not our case” to Tommy in the premiere, when it seems like their predecessors Raymond and Rusty will remain in charge; his deadpan, hands-in-his-pockets nonchalance when telling Rusty that he’s “out of control” or his self-satisfied joke that Tommy has a narcissism complex and persecution “duplex” are clever contradictions of tone and text. He laughs like a frog cackling, throaty and staccato and rich; he sits in a way so that his head always looks hunched back onto his neck while his chin thrusts forward and his eyes look down his nose, like a bird rearing to attack. Presumed Innocent cuts to him often for reaction shots, and he’s invariably letting his mouth hang open a bit, like he’s aghast, or following Rusty and Tommy’s arguments with his eyes flickering back and forth, as if he’s taking in a particularly riveting tennis match. He’s our audience surrogate, inside and outside the story at the same time, and his little tics — like picking up and smoothing down his tie when he’s impatient, or wiggling his bottom jaw back and forth when he’s irritated — puncture the series’s heightened drama with moments of lived-in personality.
In The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that Daisy Buchanan’s voice was “full of money,” with privilege and protection giving her such mystique. Nico’s voice isn’t wealthy, exactly, but it is imbued with amused distance, like he’s an alien watching humans for the first time and can’t help but be enthralled by their petty little dramas. (An Apple TV+ crossover suggestion: Get this man on Sugar!) And a lot of Nico’s superior-being-observing-insects vibe can be traced back to his bizarre accent, the highs and lows of it, its melodic drone and brusque verve. It is nonsensical, and it is wonderful; more wacky voices in Hollywood, please! Whatever else David E. Kelley does with the second season of Presumed Innocent, he needs to make sure Nico Della Guardia is once again on the case.