Jekyll

I feel like a bit of a Robert Louis Stevenson defender after I took 'History of Ideas' here at Pitzer freshman year where we read 1 or 2 of his books (and a bunch of HG Wells) in detail looking at the ideological advances of the industrial revolution within them, and found them to be much deeper than they are reputed to be. So of course, when I saw a series on BBC this summer called "Jekyll", I watched and was intrigued. I only saw one episode (their programming schedule is so strange), but finally went back and watched the whole 6 episode series, so glad I did.

"Jekyll" is about a modern day Jekyll and Hyde situation. A middle aged man finds he starts having blackout spells and eventually realizes he has another person inside his head who takes over savagely for stretches of time. They don't know what happens to each other and have to communicate via recorded messages. Throw in some government conspiracy, some drama with his wife, the convenience of modern technology (GPS tracking while he turns to Hyde) and you got a six hour miniseries. The plot played out well, it connected it to the original Jekyll/Hyde, and it had a very fitting ending. Oh yeah and enormously entertaining. Never had six hours fly by that fast.


The greatness of it was mostly due to the fantastic portrayal by James Nesbitt, an Irish actor who easily switched from exhausted world-weary Dr. Jackman to manaical and high energy Hyde. Part of the story had to do with a physical transformation that happened, making people 'really' believe he had two personalities, and wasn't just crazy. Changing his hair and putting in contacts was all they did (maybe some anti-wrinkle cream too), but that was plenty because he changed his expressions so much. He was in practically every scene and he was so fun to watch. I hope he gets more roles here in the US. Check out the Jekyll grin:

Best part though, was their throwback to Stevenson's original prononciationg of the name (yeah I'm a nerd). Apparently, with Stevensons thick Scottish accent Jekyll was pronounced more like 'gee-ckle', but nobody really stuck to that. They mentioned it several times in the series, loved it.