“I leave an arrant knave with your worship; which I beseech your worship to correct yourself, for the example of others … I humbly give you leave to depart; and if a merry meeting may be wished, God prohibit it!”
first time at the Movie Museum last month, I was struck by how differently Keaton and Fillion portray Dogberry.
If you’re familiar with Beetlejuice and Keaton’s portrayal of the slimy, hilarious, off-the-wall afterlife denizen the film revolves around, you’ll recognize hints of him in Keaton’s Dogberry. He even growls in the same voice Keaton uses for Betelgeuse and is unabashedly nuts in each scene he appears in. The performance is pretty funny, and I never really had criticisms for it. Until I saw Fillion’s version, that is.
Fillion, too, taps his own past performances, using bits of Mal to create his Dogberry, such as the quirky and understated delivery Fillion uses for his lines in Firefly. He lets the lines do their work and doesn’t rely on dramatic gestures and a funny-sounding voice to portray the absurdities of his character (Dogberry is particularly known for his brilliant malapropisms.
malapropisms).
The laugh-inducing facial expressions Fillion uses (my favorite is when he gives us his “stunned” look) are subtle to Keaton’s outrageous. They help portray Dogberry as a man who tries to be the hero, only to have his feelings hurt by the revelation that he just isn’t all that smart (also, he’s called an “ass,” by one of the villains, which bothers him greatly), instead of as a crusty lunatic.
Of course, by the next scene, his hilariously over-sized ego has convinced him that he is, in fact, a hero after all: