He has won the Oscar twice playing unpredictable and temperamental individuals, in which he knew how to combine a dose of mystery and a touch of sympathy, and although Christoph Waltz is actually a complete actor who has done all kinds of roles in his career, if There’s a reason he gets hired over and over again, it’s because only he is capable of making an absolutely hateful guy win our hearts. There is something of that in the new Prime Video series The Consultant, the first time that the actor heads the cast of an American series.
Waltz plays Regus Patoff, an eccentric advisor who arrives without warning at a video game company where a tragedy has just occurred, in which the founder who until then decided everything has lost his life. With only a piece of paper in his hands that puts him in charge of the company, Patoff, who speaks with a heavy Russian accent and claims to be from Crimea, begins to make striking decisions, never hiding the fact that he has no idea what’s going on. what are video games
The most concerned about what is happening is Elaine, played by the rising Brittany O’Grady, who served as private secretary and contact with the world of the deceased owner, and ends up dealing with the newcomer permanently. Her adventure partner is Craig, a video game programmer played by Nat Wolff, who helps her discover who this man with a diffuse past and inscrutable intentions is.
Variety points out that the best of the series is Waltz, whose Patoff is an enigma since he arrives at the office and asks for help up a ladder even though he doesn’t seem to have any physical problems. His character quickly breaks all the rules of a workplace and does not hesitate to smell each of the employees to decide if he fires them or not. As if he were a boss from hell, he seems to work around the clock and on one occasion requires Elaine to show up at the office in the wee hours of the morning, simply to show him the details of her personal file.
In an interview with The New York Times Waltz, who was a popular actor in his native Austria and Germany and was working occasionally for English films when Quentin Tarantino cast him as Colonel Hans Landa in Inglourious Basterds, for which he would win his first statuette, detracted from his performance: “I don’t think good actors exist. If you play an interesting role in a valuable story and they have chosen you, you have to be a real idiot not to get it right ”, he pointed out with his characteristic sense of humor.
Asked about his resistance to joining the wave of good roles on the platforms, Waltz explained that participating in a series requires a vote of confidence: “In the cinema they give you the complete script, but in a series they only show you the pilot” . And while she didn’t go into detail about what drew her to Patoff, she cautioned: “He never says he’s the boss, he just behaves like it and everyone accepts him,” suggesting he was inspired by figures like George Santos, the deputy Republican accused of having publicly lied about his background.
