Having just caught up on season two of Charmed, I've been thinking about Eric Balfour and his various different characters in various different shows because, while he is a great actor in general, it seems to me there's a specific type of role that he really excels at, and it’s all about a character with a few different layers:
1. Charming Rogue. The charming part is probably an inevitable function of Eric Balfour but there needs to also be some form of rule breaking. It might be some actual criminal activity, it might be pushing the boundaries of what a position of authority allows him to do, it might be just leaning into his billionaire entrepreneur status to get away with shit most people can't. The point is to see that he doesn't necessarily care about all of the rules of society that a lot of people live their lives by, and also to create some uncertainty about whether this is a nice guy, what his motivations are and how he's going to fit into the narrative; is he going to be one of the heroes, or is he going to make life difficult for them?
2. Heart of Gold. After you've lived with that uncertainty for a while, you need to see that this is in fact a good man. A good, kind, decent person with positive, honourable motivations for (at least some of) the stuff that he does. He helps his friends, he’s kind to strangers. He wants the world to be a fair place. There's still some uncertainty left though; it still might not be clear exactly how he's going to fit into the narrative, or what decisions he's going to make or for what reasons.
3. Cold Hard Steel. Underneath the charm and the heart, there's something dangerous. He keeps it well hidden and he only uses it when he needs to, but there's the glint of a very sharp knife in there somewhere, or the barrel of a well-oiled gun. So yeah he's a nice guy, but he's a nice guy in the sense that if you threaten one of his people he will stab you in the throat, shoot you in the face, or do whatever the hell else he needs to do to keep his people safe. It's that edge that you see in Malcolm Reynolds in Firefly with his "I start fighting a war? You'll see something new," line. It's that 'something new', that point of immobility under threat that says 'I will hold this line. This matters to me, so I will give it every single last thing that I have. I will not yield'.
And, I don’t know … maybe that’s just an interesting mix in general but it seems to me that if there’s a perfect role for Eric Balfour then it has those elements in it, and if there’s a role with those elements in it then he will do an absolutely outstanding job with it.
