Thomas Haden Church Talks HBO’s Divorce: “Anybody’s Emotional Life Is Worth Examining”
Craig Blankenhorn/HBO
Thomas Haden Church’s character on HBO’s Divorce is not a perfect father, and frankly, far from a perfect husband. He’s monotonous, whiny, pretentious, passive-aggressive and long-winded. Perhaps these personality peccadillos were endearing to his wife, Frances (Sarah Jessica Parker), when they were first dating, but now that the couple has hit middle age, they’re infuriating—so much that she’s driven to have an affair with a college professor (Jemaine Clement) and shoot her husband the finger when he’s not looking.
As evidenced by her actions, Parker’s Frances is no picnic herself, but the larger point is that Church and Parker’s characters fell out of love long ago and spend the first season of Divorce pursuing the titular split. As they begin to trudge through what soon becomes a series of openly nasty, vindictive proceedings, they’re simultaneously forced to reckon with both why their marriage failed and whether or not they truly do have any remaining feelings for one another.
“Next season there’s obviously custody stuff to work out and shared assets,” says Church, a veteran actor who has also starred in films like Sideways, Easy A and Spanglish. “But we really want to get a sense of how we are all moving on. That doesn’t mean that the divorce is going to be resolved anytime in the near future. Sarah Jessica and I both feel like this season has been defined by a lot of confrontation, hostility, blame-throwing and finger-pointing. We want to move past a lot of that and break new ground because we’re with the family and kids.”
Church recently called up Paste to talk about Divorce’s Season One finale (which airs Sunday at 10 p.m.), ruminates on Robert’s many acts of aggression (such as handing Clement a gun, in one particularly jarring scene) and predicts what’s next for his character and his soon-to-be ex-wife.
Paste: Audiences are introduced to Frances and Robert at the lowest point of their marriage: Frances is cheating on Robert, and Robert appears to have stopped putting in any effort at all. What do you think drew this couple together in the first place?
Thomas Haden Church: It was discussed liberally. In between actually starting shooting in November, we had about eight months and SJ and I would check in periodically. We would have these vague yet specific esoteric imaginings about who they were, even before they met, because given that we’re both 50ish in the show and been together for 20ish years—we discussed the distinct possibility that they’d had whole relationships, but didn’t get together until their late 20s or even 30s. 20 years later, where did that disconnect begin? How long-simmering had it been?
The lacking of emotional awareness is something I’ve talked about on Robert’s side. He’s allowed himself—and I think this is fairly commonplace in our society, and certainly not exclusive to men—to go with the rift. In the first few episodes, really the first three or four, he doesn’t have any real emotional connection to his children, the people he works with, to his ostensible friends, which is almost unilaterally Tracy Letts’ character, Nick. He has no real connection to Nick. The comedy just comes out of the absurdity of Robert’s complete emotional isolation. The episode when I sit down with the workers at the job site and ask them about their lives, their happiness and their marriages, it’s not insincere at all. It has to be sincere, but the comedy comes out of the absurdity of the situation. One of the workers said he’s got a guy who can get me a gun, and boom, I’m giving Julian a gun. The gun idea was my idea, because I wanted to bring in a level of not danger or threat, but something that was more mysteriously absurd. But my point is that there is something slightly unhinged about where Robert is emotionally.
Paste: My read on Robert’s handling of the Julian situation is that he is trying to redefine or repossess his masculinity to some extent.
Church: There’s clearly some salient moments with that. In “Church,” he’s aggressively working out with the heavy bag, and in the very end he’s injecting himself with testosterone. Which you know, that’s a very common thing in society now, it’s not that edgy. But we introduce the possibility that he’s doing too much and that is compelling him. Even at the archery range, which is such a lighthearted, romping thing, but I ask my daughter if she could kill for me. I don’t know if you remember that moment. She’s like, “Yeah, I think so.” It wasn’t written. Everybody was just like, wait a second, you’re asking a 12-year-old if she could kill for you?
Paste: But I feel like he might be just doing these hyper-aggressive things to assert his power over a situation that’s surpassed his control. Even if he isn’t truly a violent man.
Church: Absolutely. What good is it to point [the gun] at Julian or keep it at my side? The introduction of the weapon, there it is, there’s the threat. Robert immediately empowers himself even further by giving Julian the gun, which is to say, “Whatever you do with it, I’m fine, I’m good.”