The Show:Sneaky Pete, Season 1, Episode 4
The Moment: The nine-minute monologue
Con man Marius (Giovanni Ribisi) owes money to bad, bad Vince (Bryan Cranston, who co-created the series). But Marius is hiding in Connecticut under the alias Pete (hence the title). To punish Marius, Vince is about to chop a digit off Marius’s brother Eddie (Michael Drayer). (Note to actors in crime dramas: beware playing Eddies. Eddies rarely win.)
Vince’s gorgeous girlfriend and four henchmen gather for the deed. But first, Vince spins a story that lasts nine minutes: when he was a rookie cop, his experienced partner Lonnie told him to break the arm of Terence, a teenage repeat offender. Vince couldn’t do it.
Years later, Terence killed a cop. Lonnie took Vince to a desolate field, where other cops had dug a grave. Terence, badly beaten, knelt on the edge. Lonnie pressed a gun into Vince’s hand and whispered in his ear, “OK, motherf---er, you broke it, you bought it.”
This is the kind of silky-menace speech that actors live for. Everyone else in the room stands rigid, silently listening, while you purr around, pour yourself a drink, sit down, stand up, talk into people’s faces, then gaze off. Viewers know Vince is going to hand the bolt-cutters to a henchman with that exact same line.
But it’s strange watching Cranston do this here, since his previous series, Breaking Bad, mastered these scenes and then went beyond them, to places more kinetic and less predictable. Nine minutes gives us plenty of time to wonder what Vince Gilligan’s writing room would have worked up.
Sneaky Pete streams on Amazon Prime. Johanna Schneller is a media connoisseur who zeroes in on pop culture moments. She usually appears Monday through Thursday.
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