We are drawn to Quentin Plair the minute he steps on screen. It doesn’t matter if he is making the crowd go insane as the Chippendales’ favorite dancer in Welcome to Chippendales or if he is taking guff from his wife in Tiny Beautiful Things–Plair holds your attention. For two wildly different projects, Plair dove into research and rehearsal with palpable commitment.
“To be honest, what I loved–from audition to filming–was that the characters were grounded in their own messiness,” Plair says thoughtfully about Liz Tigelaar’s Tiny Beautiful Things. The limited series contender is a meditation on memory, identity, and how our past and present selves influence our future.
Plair’s character, Danny, is a former musician who takes the brunt of his wife’s aggression. Clare is played by Kathryn Hahn. I joked with him that he spends a lot of time on the receiving end of her loud, screaming reactions to parenting or work, but Danny isn’t a doormat. He could scoff and walk away, but we feel that he knows what’s at stake.
“So much of it was a lot of receiving,” he says. “There were things happening to Danny, and lot of things that I built were coming out on screen in the moment. Kathryn [Hahn] and I worked a lot at fleshing out out good years together and the bad things that happened to us so we could hold onto them. Danny doesn’t hate Clare at all–he loves her deeply. A big thing that I came away from is that when you’re younger and you have so much potential. What do you do when you feel that potential is gone? It weighs down on you–it felt like a mattress was on top of me. Danny cannot enjoy or express himself until he comes to terms with where he is in his life. When Danny leaves, it’s almost like he’s choosing to get back to where he needs to go. He’s resetting his own path.”
Plair’s other limited series contender is Hulu’s Welcome to Chippendales, the true crime account of what happened behind all those tearaway pants and skimpy bowties. Plair’s Otis is a family man adrift in a burgeoning world of excess, and we fear that the debauchery might drown him.
What Otis doesn’t expect is to be pushed aside. Steve Banerjee (played by Kumail Nanjiani) tells Otis to his face that even though pictures were taken of him for Chippendales’ wildly successful calendar, Otis won’t be included because white people would feel intimidated with a Black man hanging on their wall. Banerjee’s straightforwardness is shocking, and he doesn’t react well when Otis plans on making a second, separate calendar. Otis is one of the reasons why Chippendales succeeds in the first place.
“Murray and Kumail [Nanjiani] talked a lot about those accounts,” he says. “Those two were great friends. We were aware of what was going on, but no one viewed Steve as a racist, per se. That’s how some people talked about race. Otis feels so excluded, but he see Steve’s enormous success and wants to be part of it. He wants to do it together with Steve. I felt it there and in the dark room scene, and we wanted to play realizing that the path needs to split. Otis cannot be successful with this man blocking his path, because Steve just thinks that’s how the world can be and can’t see beyond that.”
It’s easy to see how Plair embodied a successful dancer, but audiences will be shocked to discover that he has no formal dance training. Whenever Otis is announced as the next act, the crowd goes absolutely ballistic, and it made Plair nervous that he couldn’t deliver. He and I spoke about the high you get when you know the audience is in the palm of your hand. It didn’t matter if cocked his head or pulled someone on stage–the crowd always went wild for him.
“I danced two hours a day, five times a week,” Plair admits. “I wanted to learn how to do the dancing myself to make sure it felt right in my body. I was so nervous–I really was. I hadn’t danced before, and I was surrounded by all of these incredible dancers. Otis is supposed to be the superstar dancer. I had to strip in the middle of the stage, and, to be honest, when I started to snap my fingers and roll my hips, the crowd got louder and louder. They didn’t hold back, and then it just…exploded. It was so intoxicating that the nerves went away. Murray [Bartlett] and Juliette [Lewis] were supposed to be doing a scene, but the crowd was so over-the-top that they couldn’t use any of it. It’s intoxicating. I started to crave it when it was over–I felt so empowered.”
Tiny Beautiful Things and Welcome to Chippendales are streaming now on Hulu.
