Why Mary Cannot Be Evil

winterrose16312:

This requires some explanation based on what Moffat, Gatiss, and Amanda Abbington all said in interviews, but yeah, here we go:

Back during interviews for s1, Moffat and Gatiss revealed that the original plan for Moriarty’s appearance was that Jim from IT would be his only appearance in the first season, with the last shot of s1 being Moriarty’s shoes as he came into the pool.

However, they realized they couldn’t cast Moriarty based on the scene for Jim, so they wrote a throwaway scene that they thought was cheesy, but the plan was to see who could nail it best. When Andrew Scott actually made the line “Burn the heart out of you” sound intimidating in his audition, the throwaway scene turned into the end of TGG. Clearly, they knew that the actor playing the villain had to know that his character was more than he first seemed, and they had to make sure that he could live up to it.

Amanda, by contrast, had no idea that Mary was more than she appeared to be until the table-read for HLV. When they rehearsed and filmed TEH and TSo3, she played Mary as sweet, funny, kind, and normal, and she said after HLV that if she’d known about Mary’s past, she’d have played her totally differently. Had Moffat and Gatiss intended for Mary to be villainous, Amanda would have been taken aside and told so before they filmed TEH. I mean, making a character evil but not telling the actress? That’s a huge risk, because what if Amanda couldn’t play evil? What if she’d read a throwaway audition scene with Evil!Mary and Mofftiss realized they wanted someone else? Or what if she completely bombed the office scene in HLV and they realized that they’d have to rewrite not just the episode, but the next season? Filming would have been delayed, s3 wouldn’t have been ready in time–casting someone as the villain without telling them that their character is the villain is a risk that is not worth taking.

So, yeah. If Mary were meant to be evil, Amanda would have known about it ahead of time.

It all depends on what the writers were going for. In the case of Mary, they wanted that audience shock moment of supposedly sweet, normal Mary turning around in Cam’s office and being the cold assassin. In that case, it served their purpose that even the actress didn’t know in E1 and E2 that she would end up being evil because that would have influenced her performance and given it away. With Moriarty, we knew well before we even saw him that “Moriarty=evil” so of course Andrew knew. Hell, he was cast as Moriarty, which is a big clue right there. 

A true sociopath/psychopath can be 100% convincing in their “nice” persona. Personally, I think it was a brilliant move to have Mary turn on a dime like that.

So as reasons go for “why Mary can’t be evil”, it’s not very convincing. Beyond Amanda herself tweeting that Mary is a psychopath, and tweeting the “horns” picture, there’s a ton of great meta about who and what Mary is. If not Moriarty than at least Moran and the sniper at the pool, probably among other things.

As for the risk that Amanda couldn’t play it well, that is easily removed if she’s done anything remotely similar in the past and they could see the footage. Sorry I’m not familiar enough with her work to be able to point to something specific, but she has been an actress for quite a few years so I’d be surprised if there was nothing but sweetness and sugar. She is a good actress, IMHO.