That tension defines Petty’s relationship to Russell, and Harner decided that Petty really did care about him. One of the show’s obsessions is whether you can love someone when you need something from them. We love looking at the full thing, seeing the themes that the writing is teasing out, and figuring out how we can bob and weave in those themes.” It was so much fun, and she and I work similarly. Laura Linney and I lived together in this house while we were shooting both seasons. “On a lot of shows, they don’t want the actors to know for a variety of reasons, but I like knowing the trajectory. “If you wanted to know, would share what was going to happen during the season before it was shot,” he says. It was where I was able to lean into who I thought Petty was.”įrom there, Harner relied on his extensive theater background to flesh out his performance, which was a good fit with the show’s overall approach. “The revelation is that he has emotional limitations and things are transactional. “The revelation there is not about shame,” Harner says. Early in the first season, we see him muttering about the Byrdes while he’s getting pleasured by a male prostitute - because not even a blow job can distract him from his mission. Harner, who is openly gay himself, realized Petty was a different type of character while he was shooting a gay sex scene. Those are tropes that we see frequently and that I get frustrated by.” He didn’t have massively internalized homophobia. “My biggest thing from day one was that shame was not a motivator for him,” he says. For Harner, it also made playing Petty a relief. This complexity helped Ozark earn nine Emmy nominations this year, including its first-ever nod for Best Drama. By the end of season two, when Petty is killed by Russell’s brother, it’s clear his warped sense of justice has destroyed him. When Russell gets killed, Petty barrels on, terrorizing a resort owner named Rachel (Jordana Spiro) - and manipulating her drug addiction - so that she’ll report on the Byrdes instead. For instance, he starts a romantic relationship with Russell, a low-level criminal, then forces him to become an informant. That guilt at least partially drives his reckless need to arrest Marty and Wendy Byrde (Jason Bateman and Laura Linney), who are laundering a drug cartel’s money through businesses in a Missouri resort town.Īs he tries to bring the Byrdes down, Petty makes a cascading series of terrible choices. Instead, he tortures himself because he failed to keep his mother off drugs. He frequently struggles with self-loathing, and in the first season, he assaults his boyfriend in an attempt to prove he doesn’t like gay sex.īut none of that affects Petty (Jason Butler Harner). Homophobia even affects powerful gay antiheroes like Deran on Animal Kingdom. After all, most of them meet terrible ends that are rooted in anti-gay hatred: Consider Sal in Mad Men, who loses his job and his family, or Vito Spatafore in The Sopranos, who gets gored by that pool cue. That’s an important distinction, and it makes the character - who’s in the first two seasons of Netflix’s Ozark - distinct among queer men on antihero dramas. Roy Petty’s gay, and Roy Petty hates himself, but Roy Petty doesn’t hate himself because he’s gay. Spoiler Warning: This article discusses major plot points through the end of Ozark’s second season.
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