The Succession actor is utterly brilliant in every moment of this punchy historical miniseries. His portrayal of the crank who killed the US president in 1881 takes his mastery to the next level
“M
y name,” says Charles Guiteau (Matthew Macfadyen), the anti-hero of punchy four-part historical miniseries Death by Lightning, “will be known one day all across this country!” Guiteau was, until now, wrong. He tried to insert himself into history by assassinating the US president, James Garfield, in 1881 – but Garfield was only four months into his tenure, so all Guiteau did by shooting him was turn them both into difficult pub quiz answers.
Death by Lightning pays careful tribute to Garfield, a quietly extraordinary statesman, but its focus is Guiteau and, if this show is a hit, he might finally get his wish. If so, it’ll be because Charles Guiteau has become a byword for the sort of pitiable crank that Matthew Macfadyen plays better than anyone else on television.
Wild of eye, sporting a beard that is somehow pointy and scraggly, and forever adjusting his old clothes, Guiteau is a “fantasist, a liar and a serial non-payer of bills” … who has no skills or vocation beyond relentless self-promotion. You can almost smell his desperation as he pings from one humiliation to the next: a bank manager instantly refuses him the loan he needs for his ill-conceived plan to found a newspaper; Guiteau’s snooty brother-in-law (Ben Miles) correctly tells his kind wife Franny (Paula Malcomson) that her brother is a parasite who will never repay her faith. Female company eludes him even when he spends five years in a free love commune, because he was too annoying for any of the women to have sex with him.
