A very happy birthday to the gorgeous Margarita!!
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brucelee8473 — 11 years ago(February 09, 2015 09:45 PM)
I have a habit of checking out the Most Popular Celebrities born each day (hardly any on my own birthday). When I saw Margarita Levieva I was reminded of Allegiance, whose pilot episode I watched and largely disparaged last week in the AV Club's review (you can tell from how long this is, and my thing for parentheses, which comments I made). I also had a lot to say about her, both in the show and as an actress, and after thinking about what I'd written for a while I decided to learn as much about her as I could, to see if I was right.
While I still believe that Allegiance is not a particularly good show (I've never seen The Americans and so took it on its own terms, which are1c84 strictly average), she is excellent - as she's been in most of her projects I've seen. I found it a bit insulting that reviews of the show seemed to think she was suited for the part because she's Russian, but I saw an interview in which she said it was one of the parts she felt wasn't stereotypically Russian, and I can't argue with that.
I think she's an actress to be admired, not simply for her astonishing beauty (and not beautiful in the typical Hollywood way but something more real), but her intelligence, conscientiousness and real presence on screen. It's her face - especially her eyes - that does it; another thread called her seductive and dangerous all at once, and that seeming duality goes a long way. Even in stuff I've disliked - a rather flat, underused guest appearance on "The Blacklist" and an unpleasant shrew in the trashy, pointless
The Loft- she doesn't give a bad performance but makes her best effort with blah material.
I also complained that many of her roles are femme fatale types whose sexuality are a big part of her character, but that was wholly ignorant of the depth and complexity she brings. She is almost always confident and assertive in her sexuality, and rarely if ever acquiesces to the men. Not a sex object or damsel in distress, no - she's a woman who knows what she wants and fights for it. Maybe that's why her role in
The Lincoln Lawyer
was not one of her best; she's too strong a personality to play a straight-up victim.
Her career will undoubtedly reach new heights from here, and while she certainly deserves the attention, I worry that celebrity status could cause her to lose some of what makes her so fascinating: that down-to-earth quality with which actresses like Jennifer Lawrence stand out can get chewed up and spit out in the Hollywood grind, and we need more people like these two. For every actor or actress who stumbles their way honestly through an interview, you get at least two or three celebrities who are so numbed to mindless questions that they spout off the same canned BS no matter what they're promoting. So far, though, that doesn't appear to be the case. She seems open to all sorts of roles, like the succubus in the tongue-in-cheek
Knights of Badassdom
, and she continues to work in the indie world like Sundance fave
The Diary of a Teenage Girl
, which balances out nicely with her TV and Hollywood projects. The latter get her noticed, but I think the former (and I count
Adventureland
in that category no matter what anyone says) are just as if not more important.
So here's to you, Margarita Levieva (I finally know how to pronounce your name correctly). I hope to see you on screen for a long time.
- she doesn't give a bad performance but makes her best effort with blah material.