James Spader has managed to bewilder us with his ever-so-evident evident screen presence since the 80’s. The man still keeps us on our toes with his role as Raymond Reddington in the TV series “The Blacklist”. The Blacklist is a show based on the story of a wry supervillain on a methodical crusade to wipe out other villains.
James Spader as Reddington. Source: Entertainment Weekly
The Blacklist is a pace-driven series that clearly has an episode formula, and leans heavily on Red’s idiosyncrasies to elevate it above a genre piece. Spader’s character as Raymond Reddington is wisecracking but dark and pretty deadly as well. In fact, Reddington is a criminal mastermind, making it to #4 on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives, who suddenly turns himself in after 20 years of evading the FBI. Man, that’s twisted!
Spader says he is regularly in contact with the writers regarding his character to The Guardian,
“If I’m choosing a project on content,” he says, thoughtfully sucking a boiled sweet, “it’s through a prism of sexuality, in the oddest corners of someone’s life. I’m not someone so much interested in exploring a slice of life unless that is down the corridor, around the corner, up the alley, and down the rabbit hole. That I like.”
In a talk with The Entertainment Weekly, h e talked about how Reddington would be like in the next season with Liz Keen's death and all that,
“He’s faced with a very complicated set of circumstances. Here’s a character who, to live his life for the past 20 years, he has found comfort in fate and I think it empowers him and gives him confidence when entering any set of circumstances, no matter how dire; that there will be an end and he is prepared for that with a certain amount of comfort or at least comfortable with the fact that it could happen at any time. He’s certainly not as unprepared for [death], which I think actually informed the first half of the season a lot as well. During the fugitive period in the first half of this third season, he found himself in a unique set of circumstances for himself where suddenly he was responsible for somebody’s life, that he had not come to terms with the fact of the end of their life and how their life might play out.”