Big Love differs from other cable series in its unpredictable casting. The Sopranos, True Blood, Mad Men and Six Feet Under, for example, generally have cast unfamiliar, even unknown actors, in the leads, so as to avoid viewer preconceptions. (I was barely aware of who Edie Falco (Carmelo Soprano) and James Gandolfini (Tony Soprano) were when The Sopranos began and didn’t know most of the casts of the other shows.) Big Love has taken the opposite tack by signing on better known actors and setting them down in unlikely roles. I would never have imagined casting American indie actress Chloe Sevigny (Boys Don’t Cry, American Psycho), as the repressed, sexually and otherwise, Nicki, Roman Grant’s daughter, whom Bill married for political reasons, in an attempt to being some rapport between him and his father-in-law, and who finds herself caught between conflicting loyalties to her husband and father. She’s a revelation in that role. Similarly, I never realized how good Jeanne Tripplehorn could be when she had a part worthy of her talent. The actress, who was previously best known for her ordinary roles in bad movies like Basic Instinct and Waterworld, is superb as Bill’s only legally recognized wife, who was never born to the polygamous faith and who has thus never quite reconciled herself to it. (The reasons she agreed to it are revealed at the outset of the show but I won’t spoil that for you.)The same could be said for Bill Paxton (Twister, Apollo 13), who as Bill Henrickson, plumbs the depths of ordinariness, even banality, to get at a multilayered persona beneath, someone who is more like Roman than he can admit. That’s a tour de force performance Paxton never got to give in his competent but one dimensional movie roles.
