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Feud’s James Baldwin Was Real to Chris Chalk
“If I think of playing it as his imagination, does it become some sort of fetishism? It’s better for me to just play him as a real human.”
That is, until one James Baldwin (played by Perry Mason ’s Chris Chalk) snaps him out of his funk to evaluate what it is Truman was trying to accomplish with Answered Prayers in the first place. Their vanity, bawdy humor, and outright disdain for humility and compassion — “All my Swans are terrible mothers,” Truman intones as we watch a drunken Babe barely make it through a children’s birthday party, collapsing pathetically in her bathtub — are laid bare with a craven cruelty Feud had mostly avoided, as if the FX series hoped to offer a gilded version of the lives Capote most wished to embalm in his writing. The entire façade of the Swans disappears in this episode; it’s almost like we’re getting the version of Answered Prayers Baldwin could’ve written — or the kind he’d hoped Truman would write.
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